Putting the poor to sleep

Welfare in Pakistan – it’s a snooze-fest

Literally. The ‘Islamic’ Republic of Pakistan has evolved into a quackery of its own making where its multiple personality disorder has engaged in quite cunning banter with its fraudulent self. Our minarets loom tall and foreboding above our pilfered morality, our alms-allotting sweaty palms wring dry over those browbeaten by the savages of society and fragments of fiscal ruin and our off-licence love affair with upping the ante on being a country with some of the highest statistics for doling out to cherry-picked charities make us a standard textbook abstraction in conflict and contradiction. We profess – through the dictates of a religion we trumpet in an off-kilter tune – loving the people, the poor and the damaged but we don’t lose any sleep over them because some of us are putting them to sleep in the most basic way possible.
Allow me to elaborate. Pakistani homes come equipped with ‘watchmen’ who, apparently, watch your gate, open your gate, close your gate, guide you into a square-jawed parking space, hold open your car door, close your car door and what have you. These are the foot soldiers in the march against the random delights of ‘DIY’. I ‘own’ one, you ‘own’ one and we quite enjoy our wishy washy whimsy at being able to play elitist within the confines of our own homes. After all, we paid for the privilege didn’t we? With the recent dengue debilitations wrecking paranoia on us kothee dwellers, I noticed my private bouncer demean his usual upright gait with the dribbling prowess of a two-year old. His drowsiness and inability to focus on anything further than two index fingers away from him alerted me to the probability that a dengue case had infiltrated my carefully Morteined and ‘coiled’ four walls. However, on my insistence that he be taken to a doctor, he replied that he had already sought medical care and that the ‘doctor’ had urged him to rest and take his medication. I dug out the ‘medication’ – prescribing what I saw would be enough to put the muddled medical practitioner out of a job and a licence…in any other country.
Lexotanil. Three hefty happy pills every day for one week. Anyone familiar with relaxants and sleep medication will know that one pill is enough to knock you out for an entire day, two will leave you incoherent, droopy and uprightly challenged enough to draw some serious attention to yourself and with three, well you flop over and snooze, no matter where you are. Repeat the process for six more days. The result is the carelessly woven fabrication of our misguided moral malpractice. For all the truths we sell, the lies we closet and the outrage we mute, our remedy for the human condition is repugnant. Peerless prescriptions serve to antidote adequate nutrition, liquids, real medication and plenty of rest. Duping those who know no better by prescribing drugs that enable them to “sleep off” whatever illness inflicts them is, well, caustically ingenious. Quacks and those medical professionals looking to make a speedy buck sign their names to an overdose of sleeping aids knowing that the patient will sleep like the baby of a coke addict and will wake up a week later feeling all rested out. This isn’t medicine – it’s marginal malpractice.
Any nagging claims that Pakistan does not practice the distorted dogma of social Darwinism are lost to the quick-fire hypnosis under which the majority of our public ‘sleep’. We do not need an overly egotistical citizenry eager to compete in this society to take the reigns of this survival of the fittest arena like the devious doctor mentioned above. We do not need an overly zealous populace promoting a self-perpetrated regulation of the economy and social structures to fiddle with the fascist folklore made viable by a latter day form of Darwinian social bigotry. No, why so many motley ‘professionals’ and symbols of welfare in this land of the pure and perverted manage to get away with such pedestrian performances against humane advantage is because of the laissez-faire posturing of our representatives. When they switch off the lights to our progress, fuel the chilly throes of our energy-less discontent, serve us ‘memos’ instead of resolutions and pocket our funds for social prosperity, what makes the trickle down affect any saner, sweeter or more sympathetic to those waiting to catch the drops on their parched, cracked lips?
When we can put the poor to sleep without losing any sleep, one wonders just how easily those in the house of representatives tuck themselves in after a day of pilferage, pandemonium, soapbox shenanigans and prescribing all the wrong remedies for the country’s woes. No doubt, they have a swollen stack of Lexotanil by their bedsides.

The writer has an opinion and is not afraid to use it. She can be reached at [email protected]