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Nursing..., Paris..., Vagabond..., Serbs... , Holocaust..., Romancing...
I actually have a lot to say about the article from a personal point of view and hope to spend some time doing so in the future... I suppose you could summarize my approach this way: Thank you for pointing out what we can become as nurses when we become complacent and or lazy. The nurse portraits you painted were outrageous, but very real and very possible. It was not nice to read that article and see little hints of myself on a "bad" night at work. If every nurse reads the article with that spirit it will have been greatly helpful. Would you mind if I print the article off and post it on my ward? For your own sense of "well-being" please keep in mind that there are many many nurses who are the exact opposites of the nurses you portrayed. I only hope you will find them and they will find you the next time you or someone you love needs a nurse.
Bo Graham
bgraham@wimsey.com
http://vanbc.wimsey.com/~bgraham/bo.html
Too often in my two short years as an LPN have I witnessed nurses irritated at the prospect of doing something more at work than reading Secret Romance or some other similar crap. I naively believed going into this profession that people who felt an innate desire to help others would be dominant. I was as I said, naive. I personally never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I've done many things. In nursing school I was delighted as I knew I'd found that job that was truly satisfying, more than a paycheck. Today however, I'm giving serious thought to leaving the profession. Your idea of a psychological test or any other way to start insuring that people who enter this field don't despise those who depend on them is LONG overdue. I'm no angel, anyone who knows me will tell you that. But many of my patients and their families would dispute my lack of angelic heritage, a fact that I am very proud of. By the way, I'm an agency nurse. Thanks for writing your article, I don't vent much working 3rd shift and I was starting to wonder if maybe my dissatisfaction with pt. care and some (too many) nurse's attitudes was just my own warped perception. I see I am not alone and it is a relief.
With best regards...
M00234@cris.com
WM's reply:
I think you should stay because you'll surely be missed. One beam of light in the darkness. I received some reaction from some other nurses -- interestingly enought they were all male nurses who expressed their agreement. One linked to the page and another nurse posted it on the bulletin board on his floor. So as modest as it is, the problem is getting attention
read yer page about drink to the dying - broke my little heart, lost my pop a year an a half ago - he got to die at home - it was the same as yer letter.... he was only vaguely conscious with his mouth open - a gurgling - and i put drops of water in his mouth.... ..thanks.... i needed that\
C.
Today I read your recollections from Paris. It wrenched all my insides. I lived there one year in the 16th arr., in the surroundings of Boulevard Sebastopol, and in the 13th. I studied and worked there and I know the city better than any other. But most important is that there is no place in the world like Paris. When I landed there after a few years' absence, I almost cried as the plane's wheels touched the ground. I think that I lived there a slice of life incomparable with anything else ... whenever I read or see something about Paris, I have a problem. I don't know if it is nostalgia for what belongs to the past or a feeling that life is passing and all this will never again be mine ... You wrote it nicely ... besides this, nice artwork. Congratulations.
Wojtek Kujawski
kujawski@intranet.on.ca
http://greenbuilding.ca
Your "Vagabond" is a very original initiative created with great taste. Congratulations. I'll certainly read the old and the new articles with great pleasure.
We are very interested in new contacts, in exchange of information, and materials for publishing. I'm especially interested in Canadian sources. I would like to enlarge the scope of the topics we cover and take care to maintain the high quality of articles published at our address: http://www.isisnet.com/MAX
Z. Koziol
zkoziol@is.dal.ca
The article is not only a well sustained blast at the propagandists, it also informs those who didn't know or understand the relationship of the Serbs to wider Yugoslavia. For instance, the original land-patents given to the Serbs by the Austrians refer to (northern Krajina, Lika & Slavonija) these lands as `Desertum primum et secundum' - in short, empty lands.
J. Byrne
byrne@cix.compulink.co.uk
A Revisionist letter concerning this topic was published elsewhere and then sent on to me. The writer says:
"... (William Markiewicz) advocates a ?thought? that, since European Jews over the course of the centuries became so assimilated, then nobody really knows how many they were prior to WWII. ..."
It's enough to read the article to know that I never used the word or idea of "assimilation" regarding those masses, undeniably Jewish, who nobody counted. There were also some Jewish comments. In any case, to keep in tune with visitors' preoccupations, here is a powerful testimony from New York sources. WM
In the Krakow ghetto, one of the S.S. men in charge of Jewish affairs was Von Mallotke. The Jews called him "Von Malutki", which in Polish means "The Tiny One", as he had a very unusual aspect for an S.S. man: old, short, limping, with an artificial eye. There were rumours that he had gained some merits during the first world war, and had therefore been accepted into the S.S. and been provided with a higher rank and sent into the ghetto to take care of Jewish affairs. This Von Mallotke (or "Von Malutki") couldn't go to sleep and couldn't have breakfast without killing a few Jews, regardless of their age or sex. The Jewish police provided him with the victims, I am sorry to say. Once I was caught myself on the street to be sent to Von Mallotke, but I was lucky to encounter my uncle on the way. The Jewish policeman knew my uncle and said to me, "If it is your uncle, then go." So I survived, and can now testify.
During the day, Von Mallotke sometimes went hunting. Then he shot Jews who were young and athletic, because they might be dangerous. He shot small children and old people, because they were useful for nothing. Only those who were rather like him - meaning not too tall, not too young, not too beautiful -- had the best chance of surviving an encounter with Von Mallotke. This is my answer to those who would claim that in the Holocaust it is the fittest who survived.
There was a general opinion among the Jews that Von Mallotke killed because he was full of complexes on account of his condition -- his ugliness, his infirmity. With Pilarczyk, this was surely not the case. Pilarczyk was another S.S. officer assigned to the Jews in the Krakow ghetto. I saw him only once and will never forget his looks, because he was the most beautiful human being I have ever seen in my life. I paint portraits myself, so I know what I am talking about. He was much too perfect -- he looked like an android from science fiction, some being from another planet, or a mythological god. He was perhaps twenty-five years old, tall, athletic, with hair of pure gold. He had an ideally sculpted face, with a very beautiful expression and unbelievable eyes, the iris bigger than that of other people and of a strange porcelain blue with somewhat metallic reflections. So there seemed to be two rare porcelain plates in his eyes instead of irises.
Pilarczyk specialized in killing small children. He walked the ghetto streets and, viewing a child, would leave the child lying in his or her own blood, like a smashed cat. Sometimes a Jewish policeman, for not all of them were monsters, would walk along the street warning "Pilarczyk is coming!" and the streets would empty.
A while ago I received a business letter from someone called Pilarczyk. I simply couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with a Pilarczyk. It was stronger than me.
My Most Direct Encounters with the Holocaust
When the Germans entered Lvov, then a Polish town, now belonging to the Ukraine in the USSR, one segment of the multi-ethnic population started a pogrom which lasted two or three days, I don't remember exactly. The Germans left them total freedom with their blessing. The Jews were caught on the streets or in searches of their houses. We survived because there was no Jewish name on the apartment door. We lived at the corner of Sykstuska Street and Smolka Square. In this square, there was performed on the first day a ritual-like massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews. Who can really know except the killers? Our windows gazed upon Sykstuska Street and were covered with heavy curtains, so I couldn't see what happened at Smolka Square. Still, I could see through the cracks in the curtains the jubilant masses: girls with red cheeks wearing folk costumes -- it was a festivity. I heard a young woman imploring, "I am not Jewish -- let me go!", and she was dragged away with the words, "Let's finish with her quickly."
I happened to also see on this occasion a young Ukrainian saving the life of a Jewish woman with a small child, and I bless him in my memory as there were so few who helped. Amid the noises, after a certain time I could distinguish a predominant one, which sounded like the sounds of police and ambulance sirens here, extremely penetrating and continuous. I couldn't identify what it was; finally, I could recognize that it was a collective scream of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people tortured to death. In spite of my fear, I could, and still do, wonder how people could keep so much air in their lungs, to withstand such an uninterrupted scream.
My aunt died on this day. I don't know where. Lvov was, after all, quite a big city. Another day, I saw a German soldier -- Wehrmacht, not S.S. -- boxing a young, frail Jew to death, watched by a joyous, enthusiastic crowd. I walked in relative freedom on the streets because I did not look particularly Jewish, and so I was able to witness these things.
Memories from a Concentration Camp
In the summer or fall of 1944, in the Plaszow concentration camp near Krakow, I belonged to a team which worked at night to uncover a collective grave where, two or three years previously, a group of women with small children had been buried. I don't remember exactly how many corpses were present, but we worked all night. The Germans were preparing to leave -- the front was nearby, and we could hear the artillery exchanges. To hide the killing, the Germans made us dig up the bodies and burn them on the spot. The women were naked, the bodies relatively well preserved because of the quality of the soil, only all brown. The children were much more decomposed, hardly distinguishable, like balls of rotten flesh. Each of the women held a baby in her arms. The women were probably shot, as some of my colleagues believed they could distinguish bullet traces. The children were probably buried alive. One of the women had white hair, maybe an instantaneous phenomenon, as I have heard may exist, because the body was young. One woman had her mouth open as if in a scream.
The German Kapo man made a few of us search for gold teeth, which had to be pulled out with pliers. Because of the stench, we got cigarettes made from hops to smoke. One young S.S. man ordered himself a chair, sat on the board at our ditch, and threw little pebbles at us while we worked. Then he sang and played on the mandolin. I said to one of my colleagues, "If they want to eliminate the traces of their crimes, then they must kill us also" and he answered, "What you don't understand with your child's mind is that" -- and he quoted a Polish proverb -- "What the eye doesn't see,the heart doesn't suffer." In other words, he knew, and the Germans knew it too, that even if we survived nobody would pay much attention to our words. Not in the way they would if they could witness it with their own eyes.
I will just remember one more story from Plaszow, from a quite early stage of the camp when there were still children and parents in the camp. One of the S.S. men -- I don't remember his name -- used to gather a flock of beautiful Jewish children whose parents had been killed and would simply pamper these children. Then one day, when he was drunk, he just shot them. When he returned to his senses he started screaming and crying, "Where are my children? Where are my children?" and started gathering another flock. And again he shot them. And it went on and on, as long as there were children remaining.
B.W. Schreiber
I enjoyed visiting your site and thought you might be interested in considering the publication of following article or linking to its site.
Romancing Planet Earth: Let's Reverse Personal, Social and
Environmental Disorders
by
F. Richard Schneider, Ph.D.
The inquisitive mind can be a wonderful force for good. Recently, upon completing Michael J. Cohen's (MJC) new book Reconnecting With Nature: A restoration of the missing link in Western thinking, Dr. Daniel Levine, (DL), Superintendent of Schools of the Lopez Island School District in Washington State, phoned Dr. Cohen and, for use by his faculty, he transcribed the author's responses to questions about the book.
DL: In Reconnecting With Nature you say that for 35 years you have been an innovative outdoor educator and counsellor. What do you see as the present state of our relationship to Planet Earth and each other?
MJC: A majority of the world is discouraged by the costly violence, discontent and hatred growing in industrial society. The destruction of our forests, wildlife and oceans distresses most people. Each of us would like to help heal the wounds we inflict on our planet, economics and selves. Our discontent constitutes a major motivating force for recovery if we empower and support it wisely.
DL: What is the human potential for a model society?
MJC: In my work I observe that people have the innate ability to co-create with nature and sustain responsible relationships. We can produce a way of relating that organizes, preserves and regenerates itself to produce an optimum of life, diversity and beauty. We can do this without producing garbage or pollution. No person or thing need be left out or toxified. Society does not have to produce war, insanity or excessive violence. Doesn't that model sound worthwhile?
DL: Of course, but it's extremely idealistic. We would need to gain some magical wisdom.
MJC: It's neither idealistic nor magical. That wisdom is available. In fact we already have it, we just don't use it.
DL: Oh? Where is it ?
MJC: The natural world itself operates like this model. It neither creates nor suffers our problems. The global life community has sustained the model's integrity over the millennia. It has intelligent, thoughtful, "magical" healing powers. It is nature, and since we are part of nature, it is us.
DL: But if that were true, we would not be having our problems.
MJC: We are born as natural beings. We are born in and with that wisdom. It is in our soul. But we educate ourselves to discount it rather than treasure, culture and apply it.
DL: Why don't we use it?
MJC: Although we are part of nature, just as every species is different from each other, we are different, too. The major difference between humanity and nature is that people have the natural capacity to communicate and relate verbally. We interact through spoken and written language. The remainder of Nature achieves its beauty and perfection through non-language communication and relationships.
DL: Isn't our language capacity a gift from nature?
MJC: Absolutely, but industrial society uses that gift to create stories that separate us from nature. We teach ourselves to think in language while every other species, and many other cultures, think in non-language ways. We don't learn to think the way nature works, even though we are born with that capacity. Our personal and global problems result because our language stories define our destiny and they are disconnected from nature's wisdom.
DL: Can you give me an example of this phenomenon?
MJC: We live, teach and emotionally attach to a story that says to survive we must separate from and conquer nature. That story educates us to spend, on average, over 95% of our time indoors. We learn to think in indoor, nature disconnected terms. We learn to spend less than one day per lifetime in conscious non-language contact with nature. That's like expecting an infant to grow normally after it has been abandoned by its family. It is similar to an arm that is 95% torn from a body; the arm feels pain that it can't identify because it is so disconnected from the cognizant mind in the torso.
DL: But isn't that the human condition?
MJC: No, it is learned. Natural beings, including nature-connected people stay connected with nature. They continuously make tangible non-verbal contact with natural areas. They incorporate nature's wisdom and integrity in their daily lives and they neither produce nor suffer our personal, social and environmental problems.
DL: This makes sense idealistically, but we are not going to return to gathering and hunting in nature, so it seems impractical.
MJC: I didn't say we should do that, did I? You see, our indoor story and thinking tends to conclude that we must live like the first nation people. I suggest, and my reconnecting with nature process demonstrates, that we can learn to reconnect with nature and incorporate nature's wisdom in our thinking. The benefits are dramatic. What is idealistic about that?
DL:So you suggest that we learn to hunt, gather and incorporate knowledge of how nature works?
MJC: Exactly. Some people already know this is possible because they sense nature's peace and healing when they visit natural areas. However, often the nature-disconnected bias of our stories won't let us validate what we experience in nature.
DL: Can you give me a example of the significance of our detachment?
MJC: Consider this event concerning the ingrained ways of a deeply rooted, theoretically unchangeable group of hard core killers. In the West Virginia mountains, an isolated, dedicated hunting club found a month old male fawn whose mother had been killed by a car. For a week, these middle aged men, each with decades of devoted deer killing expertise, decided to feed the fawn formula from a bottle, which it suckled with half shut eyes of ecstasy. In return the fawn licked their hands, sucked their earlobes and sang them little whining sounds of delight from deep within. When the hunt broke up, these men dispersed leaving the fawn eating grass and craving its bottle. They made vague promises to return to this remote place. They said they would, as time permitted, trek the mountain and feed the fawn. A few weeks later, one of the hunters phoned the others to see if anybody knew if the fawn has been fed or had survived. He discovered that without each other knowing it, five of the hunters often visited the fawn and fed it, so it was actually getting fat. Although the fawn might be shot by someone who did not know who the deer was, it lifted his heart to think that the fawn had a chance at life because some hardened deer hunters had gone out of their way to give it to him. Significantly, he knew for sure that none of his hunt club members would shoot it.
DL: What do you think made this happen?
MJC: Obviously, neither a teacher, preacher or politician was present to educate the hunters about the value of the fawn's life and supporting it. Although it said not a word, the fawn, nature itself, was that educator. Non-verbal sensory factors within the integrity of its life touched these same factors in the lives of the hunters. The connection sparked into their consciousness their inherent natural feelings of love in the form of nurturing, empathy, community, friendship, power, humility, reasoning, place, time and a score of others. Reconnecting moments with nature engaged and nourished a battery of their natural senses. These inborn senses led a group of deer hunters to support rather than deny the life of a deer, and to bring new joy to their personal and collective lives.
DL: But relatively few people live in a natural setting that would offer them this profound experience.
MJC: We have other contacts with nature that do the same thing. For example, I recently participated in a hurried, almost stressful training schedule for people whose differences kept them arguing amongst themselves. They had little interest or time to hear an explanation from me of the unifying and healing benefits of the reconnecting with nature process. In the midst of this hubbub, a young bird flew into the meeting room through the door. It could not find its way out. Without a word, the behind-schedule meeting screeched to a halt. Deep natural feelings for life and hope filled each person for the moment. For ten minutes that frightened, desperate little bird catalyzed those seventy people to harmoniously, supportively organize and unify with each other to safely help it find its way back home. Yet when they accomplished this feat, they cheered their role, not the role of the bird. In their story of the incident, the role and impact of the bird went unnoticed. They returned to the hubbub of the meeting, as if nothing special had happened.
DL: Did you point out to them the impact of the bird, of nature, upon them?
MJC: I wanted to say something about the powerful effect of the bird but I didn't. People would have scoffed. They would have said what you said, that what happened was not important or useful for it was uncommon to have a wild bird interrupt their lives.
DL: I think I'd agree with them.
MJC: Would you agree that reconnecting with nature during that incident brought a special joy and integrity to their lives, as with the deer hunters? The individual and collective benefits were evident. It is the continual lack of such contact that creates our disorders. People feel distraught, yet helpless, about Earth's life and their lives being at risk, like the fawn and bird.
DL: Yes, but isn't this a vicious circle? We are radically separated from nature and lose its benefits, so how can we possibly use nature to gain them?
MJC: That is the heart of the matter. My work addresses it. It takes place in tangible contact with nature, in backyards, parks, even with potted plants, and wilderness, too. In any natural setting my books and courses help people learn to do, own and teach simple nature-reconnecting activities. The activities are fun and interesting. They provide, at will, the nature-reconnected moments missing from our lives. The process is an uplifting and responsible ecopsychology. It nurtures many natural senses. It produces the same profound effects catalyzed by the fawn and bird.
DL: You mean, by choice, any individual can reconnect with nature?
MJC: Project NatureConnect has published methods and materials that make this possible. We even teach people how to do this and share their experiences internationally by E-mail on the Internet at http://www.pacificrim.net/~nature/
DL: So the activities are easily available. How do they work?
MJC: As the fawn and bird incidents show, our mentality consists of many non-verbal senses and feelings. Each of these senses are by and from nature and they make up over 85% of our human mentality, of how we learn, know and relate. The activities enable us to tangibly connect with natural areas in at least 53 natural sensory ways. Just as importantly, they also teach us how to speak and reason from these nature-connected moments. The process incorporates nature's cooperative wisdom in our thinking. It profoundly alters the destructive stories that we are taught to believe.
DL: I learned we only have five senses; what do the others do?
MJC: I'll use thirst as an example, it's not one of the five: To sensibly remind us to drink water when we need it, nature intelligently created the sensation we call thirst. Thirst feelingly makes sense, It makes us aware of the dehydrated state of our being and it attracts us to water. When we drink water, we tangibly connect with part of nature. It flows through us and we feel enjoyably unstressed rewarded, quenched, fulfilled, satisfied. Similarly, thoughtfully connecting with nature through each of our 52 other natural senses produces the same results. Each connection unstresses us and enjoyably fulfills us sensibly. In congress, these many senses blend. They promote and sustain our inner nature's integrity just as they sustain the integrity and vitality of wild populations, for example: wolf communities or ant colonies. We learn to resonate and self-regulate with the global life community. We deeply feel part of something immensely important, part of life in nature and each other.
DL: What results have you observed from the reconnecting activities?
MJC: I've seen detachment from destructive stories and attachment to thoughtful fulfillments. The activities responsibly dissolve stress and discontent. They defuel and decrease stress related medical and emotional symptoms as well as apathy. Wellness, self-esteem and mental health increase. Greed wanes, for we don't continually want. That's why the activities are used in counselling, recovery, environmental and educational settings. The result is that we learn to feel good by relating to the whole of community, to natural places and things as well as people. Participants feel healthy when they do the activities.
DL: How can nature-reconnecting activities create responsible change?
MJC: We love sanity, peace and responsible relationships because they feel good and they make sense. When something we love is endangered, we act. It is the right and natural thing to do. The activities make us conscious of how sanity and peace are available to us in nature. Doing them reinforces our love for being responsible, and for natural areas too.
DL: What is their practical contribution?
MJC: Consider this: at least 600 million people internationally can learn to do and teach these activities. Think about it. What would our world be like if 600 million people daily enjoyed and shared nature reconnecting experiences that triggered effects similar to those from contact with the fawn and bird? How wonderful! These activities induce acts and internal responses that establish personal, environmental and global sanity. Therein lies hope.
DL: How can people get in touch with you?
MJC: Call me at (360) 378-6413 or write POB 1605, Friday Harbor WA 98250 Email mjcohen@aol.com Internet http://www.pacificrim.net/~nature/
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