Horrified said:
This is not funny at all. I cannot believe you are sitting here making fun of people who rely on you to help them because of their cultural differences or their socioeconomic challenges. I mean, damn. Make fun of them for something they can help, like sticking lightbulbs in their rectum. That's funny. This is not.
Oh, and after all, they can't read this, right?
Think again. I found it, and I could be any one of these patients and recognize my story being told here.
Makes me really rethink how I view doctors. Thank you, you're doing a great service to your profession here.
Oh, and I have tattoos AND teeth. Do I still qualify for mandatory sterilization?
Just a few thoughts:
"...Look, without humor we would all have committed suicide. We made fun of everything. What I'm actually saying is that that helped us remain human, even under hard conditions..."
"...But don't think that it is possible for people in such situations not to have any humor and satire. This is impossible, it is a kind of defense mechanism..."
"...At the Ghetto we were looking under ground for things to laugh at, even when there weren't any..."
"...When I was interviewed for Spielberg and they asked me, what I thought was the reason I survived, they probably expected me to answer good fortune or other things I said that I thought it was laughter and humor, not to take things the way we were living but to dress them up as something different. That was what helped me I wasn't thinking about miracles and wasn't thinking anything, I only thought how not to take things seriously, as if I thought that this was the proportion that I was giving, and I guess it (this attitude) helped me. Because it was absurd all that time, it was unconceivable, that they could do those things to people..."
"...Humor was one of the integral ingredients of mental perseverance. This mental perseverance was the condition for a will to live, to put it in a nutshell. This I am telling you as a former prisoner. However little it was, however sporadic, however spontaneous, it was very important, very important. Humor and satire played a tremendous role, in my opinion. It was a cemetery all right and exactly for that reason, the mere fact that we wanted somehow to preserve our personality, they wanted to make robots out of us..."
"...This was the integral part of our inner, mental struggle for our human identity, the fact that we could still laugh at things like these..."
"...Look, the ghetto showed that people have great vitality, as soon as a moment's time passed separating one trauma from the other people were already laughing, they maybe, even laughed more..."
From: Humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust. Thesis confirmed by the Senate of Tel-Aviv University to conferred the Degree "Doctor of Philosophy" to:
Chaya Ostrower, supervision: Prof. Avner Ziv Date: January 2000 (
http://web.macam98.ac.il/~ochayo/absractf.html)
So basically, come off your high horse...
- H
), but heard about this thread from my hubby whos going into EM. I had to add a few to the list.
