Social Dysfunction In A Vastly Different Boat
The Age
Monday August 30, 2004
Every day we do our little deals. We bargain with pain, and hope it pays off. Elderly people are frequent hagglers. They could choose to stay home and avoid the pain in their hips that comes from racing the little green man across busy intersections. Or they could take their recalcitrant bodies up to the milk bar and endure the hip pain today, in the hope that the exercise will make them feel better tomorrow. Pregnant women with aching backs lower themselves into swimming pools and puff their way up and down lanes, knowing that the pain they're suffering now will probably mean less suffering in the weeks to come.
I'm an old hand. Exercise bores me to tears, but chronic back pain is worse than boredom. So I drag my body off to the gym and deal myself out regular doses of controlled pain, pushing weights and stretching muscles, in order to avoid unpredictable doses of uncontrollable pain.Last week, as I walked a couple of tedious kilometres on a rumbling machine, my eyes were drawn to a silent TV screen tuned to the Olympics. It was the women's single sculls, and the camera repeatedly zoomed in on the faces of those solitary Amazons pulling against the heavy water. Not even Edvard Munch's The Scream comes close to capturing the look of agony on their faces. I had to turn away. Pain like that is not pleasant to watch.But they were useful images to have stumbled upon, because when Sally Robbins stopped rowing and fell back in the boat a few days later, I had an inkling of what she must have been feeling. Like the rest of her team-mates, Sally had done a deal with pain at the start of the race. The cost would be high, but the reward could be great. Somehow, though, pain pulled a swiftie on her and the deal came unstuck.Elite sporting competitions are not merely about who can lift the heaviest weights or swim the fastest laps. They are also about an athlete's skill in negotiating with pain. Somewhere along the line, we humans have decided that high pain tolerance equates to strength of character, nobility and respectability. This equation used to be applied more often to men than to the so-called "weaker sex". Boys who showed their pain were accused of being sissies or "big girls".These days, though, women are judged (and judge themselves) almost as severely as men for their ability to negotiate with pain. Women in childbirth struggle valiantly to avoid "the drugs", partly because a desire for pain relief is seen as a sign of weakness.So whose side should we be on? The side of the other members of the Australian women's rowing team, who stuck to the bargain and overcame their pain, in order not to let their mates down? Or the side of the one who discovered that there are limits to how much pain a body can cope with, and still continue to function?The term "un-Australian" reared its ugly head in the aftermath of Robbins' collapse. Looking after a fallen comrade used to be as Australian as Vegemite. But it was Robbins, rather than her unsympathetic team-mates, who was accused of being un-Australian. Since when has succumbing to unendurable pain been a crime against the nation? As most of us know, emotional pain can be just as disabling as physical suffering. Grief, depression and anger can paralyse even the strongest among us. But in recent years, there seems to have been a hardening of attitudes towards those whose emotional pain leads to physical or social dysfunction. Lip-sewing asylum-seekers in detention centres, angry members of the stolen generation, addicts blotting out childhood abuse with heroin, are all judged inadequate because they haven't found a way to overcome crippling emotional pain. There was something very strange and disturbing about the way the image of people being thrown overboard came up again during the Olympic rowing debacle. Sinking refugees who (as it turns out) didn't throw their children overboard were deemed un-Australian. Rowers threatening to throw their paralysed team-mate overboard were deemed more Australian than she was. We're a weird mob.-- sianp@netlink.com.au
© 2004 The Age