Are You Here to Get Poked, Pinched, or Prodded?

[TrueTomHarley]

The college people write PSAs and try to educate the dummies, but they are not able to effectively communicate with them. They patronize them. They talk down to them. They assign them roles and memes, always denoting intellectual inferiority, and the little people get fed up.

The college people of this world are also ill-equipped to give counsel because the world is so fragmented. Everyone cares about only their pet topic. Everyone competes with others trying to advance their cause.

“Hey, what are you here for? Getting poked, pinched, or probed?” says one ridiculous patient to another in the New York State TV doctors’ waiting room. The other fellow sheepishly admits he is in for colon screening. “Hey, it’s no big deal!” his accoster says, not unlike how apostates accost loyal ones. In another ad on the same topic, the TV wife says: “We got screened for colon cancer,” and her TV husband interjects: “so glad we did.”

This happens to me all the time, too, as I am waiting in the doctors’ office: “Hey, why are you here?” a stranger says to me, “are they going to run a scope up your rear end?” “Yeah!” I answer, “how cool is that?”

All this is a rather lengthy introduction to the way Awake educates on health, and other practical topics. The articles are written by real people, not college-educated buffoons. They afford their readers dignity. They grant them intelligence and common sense.  The most recent example that comes to mind is the #6 Awake of 2016. ‘Disease – How to Reduce the Risk’ It’s a thorough, concise, and non-condescending discussion of a crucial topic. It does not focus on colon screening, for those guys do not come around with their scopes unless you or your insurance has oodles of money. The emphasis is on basic health education for the masses. Most persons of this world are quite limited in their health-care choices.

If you have a magazine with world-wide circulation, you have a moral imperative to use it not to sell Pharma drugs, lawyer services, and automobiles, but to address concerns for the public good. Awake, the second most widely circulated magazine in the world, (the Watchtower is the first) does that. Countries with meager resources frequently express gratitude for such services. They don’t scream to high heaven, as they would in the United States, that Awake is a religious source, and thus no good. In some African nations, Witnesses were giving public education courses on how to control Ebola, cooperating (not co-opting) with the government’s efforts, but cooperating to such a degree that some governments simply handed them the ball. Articles in the Awake that deal with such public issues do not even mention religion.

It all makes one very proud to be associated with an organization that accomplishes so much good.