The past couple days made me think of an experience I heard about last summer.

It helps explain how the peoole screaming at nurses are coming from radically different place:

So a friend of mine runs a program at a major Midwest university taking classes into a local prison.

He typically facilitated a philisophy class with the inmates, but a little over a year ago he realized that since he was running the program he should also experience teaching the class to the guards at least once.

So he did.

For background, the prison is outside a big city.

Because of the inequalities and racist systems in the U.S. most of the inmates were black men from the city.

Most of the guards were white men from the county.

So he’s teaching a very different group of people. He starts talking about ethics, and starts giving his examples.

Many of his usual ethics examples are about doctors, and health. They always seemed to work fine in the inmate classes.

But when he brings up doctor examples with the guards, they start to object.

They says things like, “Doctors just want your money, you can’t trust them.”

And he’s shocked. He realizes he’ll have to find new examples to discuss ethics, because the Dr. ones won’t work with these white men from the rural Midwest.

All this is to say that while doctors aren’t perfect, I, like my friend from this story, typically trust them.

But the conservative push against science, learning, intellectualism etc. has been so effective that a swath of this country doesn’t trust them.

And that apparently extends to nurses as well.

And these insane notions are getting people killed.