PROFESSIONALLY PERFUNCTORY

We Need Nurse Ratchett!!!

On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful that my Mother was very proud to call her self a Registered Nurse, and wore that starched white uniform and cap every day of her professional life. For a time, she taught nursing at three different hospital-based nursing schools. She was serious about her duties and her professionalism—no red nail polish for her!

I am confident that her remains are roiling, maybe churning, whatever is comparable to “rolling over in one’s grave” about the new regulations demoting nursing and other occupations to “non-professional” status in order to limit loans and grants available to students in the fields. Someone pointed out that these careers are often attractive to women and minorities.

Today I was lucky to be able to lounge about and read—my favorite pastime. I polished off Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, a satire of manners in Gilded Age New York. Comparing business or “the crude fact of moneymaking” with the profession of law, Wharton noted there were always a few rich young men in the clubby law firms who had no earnest desire to really advance in the profession, and “over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.” It’s hard to imagine any green mold on any health care professional—they move fast.

Let’s not let the administration denigrate the serious and difficult work of medical professionals, teaching professionals, social work professionals and all the others upon which we rely. Come on, Washington, let’s not let this all dissolve into the perfunctory. And at all costs, let’s avoid the green mold. Happy Thanksgiving!