Monday, October 23, 2023

An Addendum, on a (British) mentality.

 Like over a year ago when I had caught up with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), he came off as very callous, talking about COVID precautions and risks to the elderly.

Like, when I had said that the virus could really spread and reach vulnerable people like the elderly and so people should still be cautious with masks, he said something about how they were at the end of their lives anyways, and if that didn’t do them in, they’d have expensive care for other stuff soon.

I can’t remember the exact parallels, too, but I’ve heard similar things in the past from him and his sister, I think…  Basically, I suspect that it’s an NHS-informed viewpoint, because healthcare costs are immediately and clearly nationally borne and so many from there automatically go to a “should we fund that?” taxpayer-throwing-their-weight-around analysis for anything having to do with health, whether pandemic precautions or gender-affirming care or sensitivity trainings for doctors and nurses or whatnot.

It’s funny, when I’ve gotten some (British) tabloids over the past few years – the sister brings me the Sunday Mail as a present after every trip home, since she knows that I like them, and that issue of that one paper is typically the trashiest one of them all, she’s said, so she specifically gets that one for me! – I’ve come across articles whose entire point was either “Can you believe that the NHS didn’t cover that?” or “Can you believe that the NHS covered that?’, alternately.

It’s like that mentality has bled into them, or it represents something broader about their country and those tabloid articles are merely a pointed expression of it.

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