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Long before the boy started coming round in the evening to cry on the stoop I wondered about those kids no one wants, or who are wanted perhaps but not affordable in some too drastic fashion: too expensive to feed, clothe, house, educate, or even care about very much. What happens in a city full to bursting with babies and toddlers and little kids everywhere to those kids others don't want so much?
To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-
A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/ 0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books& ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1
And here are some reviews and comments on said book:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon. html
2 comments:
And what you are doing in this writing is not a form of therapy, too? You might be interested in an argument for redeeming the therapeutic from the p.o.v. of a defense of individual freedom. http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/2011/05/health-care/
One thing, if maybe the only thing i can see, going in favour of your modernist tourists seeking medicine in the jungle is that they haven't yet tried to make it a right under some right to free healthcare - at least I think for the most part that's true. They are paying their own way, weighing their various therapeutic options, in a search for transcendece. And, as Adam argues at the above link (see also discussion in comments) that is likely to become more inevitable as the welfare state faces bankruptcy; we are all going to have to become more skilled in choosing therapies on our own dime, and seek out spiritual transcendence of illness and death, unless we just give in to some strict model of bureaucratic rationing of an increasingly limited (more limited the more it grows technologically and hence expensively) resource. But I think we are already seeing that many people will not passively accept the dictates of the welfare state when it comes to rationing healthcare, except when this rationing remains relatively harmless if inconvenient in the short term. People will thus seek out whatever private therapy they can afford and that will beome a learning ground for spiritual and just physical concerns.
See also the discussion contra Philip Rief's anti-therapeutic thinking, here:
http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/2012/06/after-all/
When I visited the shaman in the jungle I did so with your comments in mind. "Ayahuasca Part 8," as I recall.
Therapy is a Greek word that I can't understand in Greek. I don't recall any use of it in literature, and I don't know Hippocrates and Galen, so I must pass there; but I assume it's a neologism that we use today for something like "getting together" in consultation. The more I think about it the less I understand it.
Adam's piece is worthwhile, if readers here are interested in this topic in depth. I haven't had time yet to look at Rief. Adam is very good.
The post above is about the orphanages in Iquitos, and one could, by a stretch, cite this kind of work too as a form of therapy for people. But I think it would be wrong, a Procrustean Bed of language. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
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