Here We Go Again

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again…” Ecclesiastes 1:9

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” –Yogi Berra
 

My job is to try and help keep children as safe and healthy as possible. We treat their asthma so they can breathe and their strep throat to prevent rheumatic fever. We give them vaccines to help prevent fatal infections and to decrease their risk of certain cancers as adults as well as to protect the people they come in contact with. We talk about seat belts, bike helmets, smoking, and STDs. We discuss their emotional and mental health and their school progress to maximize their chances of becoming contributing members of society. We educate them to protect them from erroneous medical information lurking on the web and elsewhere.

There are other people who make medical discoveries that we can put into practice and people who teach the next generation of doctors and nurses. There are folks who know how to run lab tests, remove tumors, and replace joints that no longer work. There are people who publish medical journals to keep us up to date.

There are people who clean the hospital rooms well to reduce risk of transmitting infections to the next occupant, folks who monitor the temperature of the refrigerator so the medications and vaccines stay efficacious, and people who keep our buildings and medical equipment running. There are administrative safeguards put in place to make sure we are practicing medicine in a safe and ethical way.

This is just a small slice of the people in the medical system who help keep us healthy. And it is not just medical folks who keep us healthy. Most municipalities make sure the water supply is safe and waste is dealt with safely. There are systems in place to enforce the laws which protect us. There are people who build roads and bridges and buildings and maintain the electric grid so we can travel safely, cook our food, and stay warm. There is someone to get rid of the rabid raccoon wandering the neighborhood. There are people who produce and transport the food we eat. For a society to function and prosper and keep its citizens safe and healthy, there are many important roles to be filled.

And then a guy with an AR-15 or a .45 Glock with an extended magazine walks into a school/theater/church/synagogue/concert/mosque/store/bar and kills a bunch of people. And the people who died no longer benefit from all of the people who invested in their well-being; the guy who made sure their drinking water was clean, the teacher who taught them to read, the parent who loved them or the nurse who gave them their shots as gently as possible. And despite our best efforts at keeping them healthy, some people are disabled for the rest of their lives. No amount of clean water, healthy food, and preventive care stops a bullet from severing a spinal cord. And our society is similarly paralyzed. So we say a few prayers and fatalistically move on (if we don’t know anyone involved). And two weeks later I get an alert on my phone and say to my wife “There was another mass shooting in…”

Imagine if there was an immediately fatal virus that popped up every couple of weeks in a different part of the United States and no one could predict when and where it would hit next. It would just show up randomly and kill a dozen people and then vanish until the next time. I wonder what we would do.