"Garg'n Uair Dhuisgear" which is Gaelic for "Fierce when Roused"

Justice is such an inconvenience. Sure people talk the talk, but when it gets ugly, or tough, it becomes OK to ditch on the people that need a bit of help. Recently I found out that my school is no longer supporting the free clinic that I got to work at last year.

Let me qualify the word “justice” I feel that by neglecting those around us, we neglect our duty to our teammates. I have pondered this in extent, honestly its one of my favorite things to ponder on a med-long distance run. What it means to be here on earth surrounded by many other different people. I can relate it a little to sports, I realized after my first year of playing college sports that I would never make it beyond that level of sports. As well as lacking any form of actual gift at the sports, I lacked the cut-throat nature that would have pushed to make me harder/faster/stronger. But there is team.

Team is oh so much bigger then me, THAT is what I see when I see justice, that we are all part of the same team, I have a responsibility to my teammates, a responsibility to help them when they need it, to defend them if they need it, to just listen if they need it, perhaps even to tell them that they are full of shit if they need that. Justice is seeking to find that balance of caring, yet not enabling. Not leaving a teammate behind. Its not OK with me to let my teammate die because of something silly and small that can be fixed.

Sorry but I am going to get on my soap box for a moment. I did not get into this whole medical thing to pander to the wishes of the well-fed and rich people of the world. I did it to care for someone who might not get the care they need other wise. Its stupid and lofty, but really its what fires me up and my choices about my education are built to follow that dream. I don’t know what exactly it looks like or who that “person” is, but I felt that part of the solution was this free clinic that provides some level of care for people who cant/wont go to another source, or just plain don’t have another source.

It was pushed so hard last year to keep that in mind, for a moment there I actually believed that there were people around me that truly felt the same way, that it was a core value of the program, I should have known better then to trust any organization to have morals. There are morals in the individual, but ANY organization looses its individual morals and starts to compromise. This is no different. The people who were extremely active in the care at the free clinic have left the school. Once the people who guilt-ed the others into working a little extra left, the idea falls when the center does not hold.

My hopelessly optimistic side wants to say that it was not a failure because it had an impact on me, and perhaps even some others.

Right now I am just bitter and angry that this group of people have decided to abandon part of the team. It pissed me off enough that I started looking around at the nightmare of trying to transfer to another school. But that is where my wrath fails me. In the end, I will cave and just accept that they have abandoned people that I care about. I know it, they know it. Would I give up on my education to prove a point? Cant say that I would. But perhaps I can also make myself enough of a burr under their saddle for the next 11 months to satisfy myself. I am actually quite good at annoying people when I put my mind to it. Because turnabout is fair play, they know that I wont quit over this, but I know that they wont fire me over this. Perhaps it’s a bit like playing Global Thermonuclear War from “War Games”. We used to have this thing called MOD or Mutually Assured Destruction. Its what kept us from nuking the Russians, and them from nuking us, the mutual threat. Both sides know where the ultimate line is, so we can both flex a little and satisfy our selves.

Ok, now the war has begun. They drew first blood.