Good Day, God!
Here is Dr. Odontuya Davaasuren — in the center with two nurses — she is my nominee for the title of Hero. For years she was helpless as patients in her native Mongolia died in pain. It wasn’t until she went to Sweden to attend a European Palliative Care Association conference that she realized that dying in horrible pain need not happen.
At first the Health Ministry rejected her vision — saying we don’t have enough money to care for living patients! So she visited the dying and videoed their cries for help. The officials listened and now there is a national palliative care program in Mongolia.
A good death… and a good life before death — these are human rights, Davaasuren says.
As I read that, I thought about what being human means. What we can expect as a “right” and what we can’t. Many folks believe that the government has no business providing anything other than police, fire and national security protection. Everything else, they argue, ought to be the business of the individual or associations or businesses.
They rejected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s call to have all the people of the world entitled to four freedoms: the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in one’s own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Those are challenging goals, God. Yet, it looks to me as if the Scandinavian countries have come fairly close. And I am sitting here pondering what YOU might want us to have as goals?
My hope is very basic. I want there to be discussions — respectful discussions — on what we humans might work toward as worthwhile goals. Just conversations, God. Just conversations over breakfast tables . . . over conference tables . . .conversations with the homeless and with the .001 percenters.
Maybe, I could start a conversation?
Story teller,
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