CONFUSED AND CONFUSING

The Duluth Power and Control Wheel. 

I was just subjected to a compulsory indoctrination. I was required to be indoctrinated to maintain my license to practice as a registered nurse in Massachusetts, a license I have held since 1976. The indoctrination was typical. It was filled with politically motivated pseudoscience. Its goal was to discourage intelligence and gently coerce compliance. I passed the exam, but I knew I was being manipulated.

The course I chose was offered free of charge on the state's website. It was a collage of short slide shows, overdubbed by a monotonous voice which pronounced "especially" as "ex-specially". 

The subject matter is Domestic and Sexual Violence. Realizing, recognizing and responding ("The Three R's", as offered). If the course had only remained clinically faithful to these simple ideas with reference to my clinical training, it may have been useful and less infuriating. But politics and the current attempt to turn America into a socially equitable, not civilly equal, society is corrupting the clinical sphere. This is dangerous beyond imagining. 

In other words, judging from the cartoon illustrations, "equal" would entail everyone having the basic accommodations of a civil society. You know, like the amended U.S. Constitution says.  But "equitable", in the eyes of those who seek a materialistic social justice revolution, entails everyone driving a state-supplied BMW in and out of a state-supplied luxury condo complex. 

So, you see, it is up to people like nurses, mostly women and mostly doing grueling work, to be advocates for the social equity of various self-defined (and now state-defined) victim groups, like all women (paradoxically), all LGBTQIA people, all people of color, all children, all disabled people and all elders. 

The course rationalizes this burden placed on nurses with bogus pseudo-statistics, the kind you would be familiar with if you read feminist or LGBTQIA media. The statistics on violence, both domestic and sexual, are based on reporting by victims/accusers. The data is not hard data. There is no hard data offered in the course. The numbers are all based in subjective complaints. That is the Catch 22 of victim culture. 

One pseudo-statistic which stood out in my mind was that half of all Black male-female transgender people claim to have been raped or subjected to domestic violence. This percentage of claims may be true, however, anyone familiar with that population is also familiar with the characterological dysfunction of many in that population. No consideration of the group's ongoing need for psychiatric evaluation in relation to any claim was given in the course. That is neither scientific nor clinically responsible. 

The fact that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a state overpopulated by colleges and universities, would hold professional licenses hostage in exchange for completion of an elemental and politically biased social-justice indoctrination speaks to how far we have strayed as a society from the concepts of true justice, individual responsibility and clinical standards of excellence. 

The indoctrination was confused and confusing. Like all propaganda, there was no way of readily challenging it. After all, those of us without current jobs would be more likely to take a free online course to satisfy a mandate most of us find superfluous due to our clinical training. So, any confusion experienced by a subject of indoctrination (not a student) cannot be addressed in an open fashion. This means there is no refinement of the tool. Propaganda does not seek refinement by critique.

So, my state government is now participating in state indoctrination of trained clinicians to force them to accept the victim culture being fostered in colleges and universities by social justice professors with titles like Professor of Diversity and Inclusion. This made-up field is now corrupting medical practice. 

One of the most disturbing and confusing aspects of this indoctrination was its assertion that touching anyone in any way without specific verbal permission of the person who would be touched (including children and demented patients alike) is a form of physical violence. How can a clinician comfort a patient who is incapacitated with grief or trauma? How can a clinician, or anyone, ever hug another person spontaneously? What happened to the once-promoted concept of healing touch?

The motivation for this licensure requirement may have been earnest. However, it has been hijacked and implemented by a political philosophy which sees all aspects of life as a racist, sexist, able-vs-disabled and ageist power battle. The core of that philosophy is itself diseased and dysfunctional.