Open Writing

One of the joys of advancing age is the facility the mind has for reminding you about one thing when you are thinking of another. Then, when thinking of the dredged up memory, almost without fail, the memory lets the original thought that led to the secondary thought slip through the ever widening holes that appear in the structure of the recollect function once a body sprints past a certain age.

So, gentle reader, although I would love to let you into my train of thought as to how I arrived back many years to the subject of this essay, I cannot for the life of me remember what it was that evoked the memory, and so, on this wise, you are as wise as I am.

Back to cups. As a lifelong socialist I was shocked to discover that Ipswich and East Suffolk Mental Hospitals, where I ministered as a psychiatric nurse in one of my careers, had three kinds of crockery on its inventory.

The first on the list was "Cups, officers." Then came, "Cups, staff." Finally, came "Cups, patients." Anyone looking at the inventory would hardly be moved by these classifications, for they seem innocuous. However, one’s perception is radically shifted when the actual items are viewed side by side, and any thought that the distinctions are innocent is swiftly disproven.

Take, for example, the "Cups, officers." These delicious items were of fine bone china with hand painted floral decoration and bright gold rims. It made one feel special to sip a beverage from the same kind of teacup used by the Queen, her heirs, and her successors.

And whereas the "Cups, staff" were chunky, heavy, stolid, no-nonsense Stoke-on-Trent second quality rejects whose walls were as thick as the walls of the Great Wall of China, the "Cups, Patients" were made from a delicate but durable plastic with porous surfaces that harboured most of the ill-bred germs that inhabit large communal institutions, ready to be transmitted to the next unfortunate unfortunate who raised it to his or her lips to drink industrial strength tea from them.

"So what?" I hear someone exclaim. "They are only mental patients." Ah, yes, I had forgotten that they were ‘only mental patients.’ For some reason, I had them marked down as fellow human beings who merited nothing less than the best, but who were disqualified from humanity by the infliction of an hierarchy of Cups.

I suppose that at a basic level, the cup in the person’s hand in the hospital provided positive identification of a person’s status in the establishment. The gold-lipped vessels with floral patterns were Officers; the one with the kind of cups that hard wooden balls are thrown at in fairground side stalls were Staff; and those drinking from grubby looking plastic cups were mentally ill.

To be fair, that might have been the reason for the division in teacups. There were often cases where it was not possible for an outsider to detect which of the bodies inside were patients, which were staff, and which were nursing officers, or medical and administration staffers. The teacups, then, made for quick and classification with little likelihood of error.

If this was really the reason for the distinction, then there was a loophole in the fly in the ointment. It was on this wise. Certain of the nursing staff repudiated the class conscious crockery demarcation on grounds that it was an insult to those who came in last and had to take their sups from plastic cups. I was among that number who raised the battle cry, "If it’s good enough for the patients, it’s good enough for us."

This credo we translated into action by only ever and always drinking from, "Cups, patients." Had there been a sufficient number of "Cups, staff" to provide one for each patient, then we would have upgraded our sufferers to crockery proper. But, there were not enough of them to do that, so we put Plan B in place and downgraded ourselves to plastic trash.

And, admittedly, while this did not solve the patient’s pathetic pseudo-porcelain problems, it did allow a certain degree of egalitarianism to settle within the walls of a hospital named for Saint Clement, whose name means ‘mercy.’ In our protest, although the tea was strained, the qualities of mercy were not.

There is no denying that Professor J B S Haldane was right in his book, "The Inequality of Man,’ but the distinctions of disparity he addressed were those of intellect, reasoning abilities, hand-eye co-ordination, physical build and strength, and the ability to withstand attack by germs, and so forth.

What he did not posit was that whilst differences between individuals are indisputable, there existed a natural order by which mankind were classified on grounds of their worth, actual or potential, to themselves, their families, their communities, or nations. In essence, no person, however disadvantaged she or he might be from whatever cause, is less deserving than those with extraordinary gifts.

Human society fails when artificial distinctions are imposed either by tyrannical laws, or by irrational prejudice against individuals or groups on no fairer grounds than for something over which the individual or group has no control. These include concretions such as skin colour, education or lack thereof, nationality, physical appearance, or gender, etc.

Hitler imposed discrimination against the mentally ill, Negroes, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jews, and others he hated or feared, based on the evils of false irresponsible sciences forged in his diseased mind. These he called ‘untermenschen,’ meaning, ‘sub-human,’ and declared them ‘unfit to live.’

Although it would be wrong to say that the teacup classifications were the result of similar hatred for the ‘lesser eligible,’ it is nevertheless a part of the same family whose ancestral roots are buried into the fertile earth that allows unquestioned disdain for those who are not like ‘us’ to flourish and propagate with ease.

Those declared to be ‘other,’ whether the description of ‘otherness’ is determined by a nation’s lawgivers, a neighbourhood’s false perception of ‘outsiders,’ from twisted science, or from an insouciant and amoral religious dogma, the results are always unequivocally comparable.

Common humanity is invariably decent. Given the opportunity, that decency will be the referent to which all our legal and social mores, our interpersonal theories, our desired social conditions and climates are compared, and that also informs all actions we undertake that directly or indirectly encroaches upon on the lives of others.

No respectable human being will undertake any course of thought or action that has either the latent or manifest intent that aims or is likely to lead to make anyone else either be considered or made to feel less than human, or less worthy of our esteem, comfort, care, protection, advancement, and affection.

Less worthy objectives can be initiated by xenophobic paranoia in the minds of the politically powerful and their vacuous followers, and have in many cases led to the wholesale destruction of nations, populations, political groups, disparate ethnicities, and religious denominations. This march to madness can begin with something as monumental as the delusional system of a megalomaniac, or with something as outwardly innocuous as a teacup.

Copyright © 2008 – Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Ronnie's Stories:

http://www.openwriting.com/archives/letter_from_america
http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html
http://bonzer.virage.net/?s=bray
http://www.openwriting.com/archives/a_shout_from_the_attic

For information about "Retold Yorkshire Tales" CDs, contact: YorkshireTales@aol.com
or see website http://yorkshiretales.com [under construction]