Choices

This is not precisely arts related, but as particular students of human experience in our lives and work, I found it important. So if you haven’t read “Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices” yet (which cost an estimated $400K to report, if reports can be believed [and which leads to a whole other line of discussion]), you might want to set aside your lunch hour today.

Even some 13,000 words later, I still felt that I couldn’t fully wrap my mind around what had happened at Memorial Medical Center. At the end of the article, of course, there is no grand right/wrong resolution to the choices faced and made by the people in this story, so I found myself skimming on through the reader comments, as if I might find something there. I didn’t. However, some of the comments included additional anecdotes from that time, making it clear that even after reading $400K worth of reporting, there’s always going to be more information you don’t have. And so unless you were there, and perhaps even if you were, you never really could understand a situation so complex as this.

Maybe this is the point at which we rely on art and ritual to take our hand in such matters.