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The society which punishes care
Dear Casper,
Another strain of the flu is spreading. Hospitals are reinstating mask mandates. The warning lights are flashing, all over again.
At the same time, parents are sending their obviously sick children to school. People are shopping while coughing through crowded aisles. Public health has become an afterthought, framed as a personal inconvenience rather than a shared responsibility. Do you really think the cashier wants to touch the products you’ve been coughing over?
It is easy to call this moral failure. It is harder, and more honest, to ask why this behavior has become normal.
For years, we have been told that responsibility is individual. That if we fall behind, it is our fault. That missing work, even when we are sick, is a personal weakness. The reality is simply that many people cannot afford to stay home. Missing a shift can mean rent insecurity, lost healthcare or an empty refrigerator. When survival is at stake, ethics are treated like a luxury.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; This did not happen by accident.
A small group accumulated astronomical wealth while wages froze. In my entire working life, I have never seen the minimum wage increase, and I am over 30 years old. Healthcare has been tied to employment. Paid sick leave became optional. People were fed scraps, and then told to be grateful. Then they were taught to resent their neighbors instead of the system that trapped them. Be angry at the parent down the street. Be furious at the worker who showed up sick. Ignore the people who designed a world where slowing down is punished.
What looks like indifference is often desperation. What looks like selfishness is frequently a system forcing impossible choices. That does not excuse harmful behavior, but it does explain it. That explanation matters if we want anything to change.
Viruses do not care about politics, exhaustion or denial. Biology does not negotiate. Public health only works when it is collective. Responsibility without support is not responsibility at all. It is coercion.
If we want people to act with care, we have to build a society that allows it. Paid sick leave. Accessible healthcare. A culture that values community over constant productivity. Until then, we will keep seeing the same cycle. People blamed for choices they were boxed into making.
The rot is not in our neighbors. It is in a system that breaks solidarity, then scolds us for failing to show it.
Luc Colgrove
Casper
Reducing amputations for patients in Wyoming
Dear Casper,
Each year in the United States, more than 150,000 lower-limb amputations are performed, most often due to diabetes, vascular disease, trauma and non-healing wounds. Here in Wyoming, rural geography and limited access to specialty care can make these outcomes more common — often because patients arrive too late or are never told they have options.
What many people don’t realize is that a significant number of these amputations are preventable. In my experience, second opinions can save limbs.
Wyoming Wound Care was founded by Michael Reed, who built the practice around one core belief: patients deserve access to specialty-level wound care before being faced with life-altering decisions. I later purchased the practice from Michael, and today we continue to work side by side, caring for patients together and carrying forward the same mission he started.
Too often, patients are told that amputation is the only solution. That is not always the case. With early intervention, proper diagnosis, and advanced wound care techniques, many patients have more options than they’re initially given. When a second opinion is sought — especially before a major decision like amputation — it can change the entire course of care.
At Wyoming Wound Care, my focus is not on making promises, but on careful evaluation, advanced treatment approaches, and ensuring patients fully understand their choices. In many cases, that second look opens doors patients didn’t know existed.
My hope in writing this is simple: that patients and families across Wyoming know they can ask questions, seek second opinions and advocate for themselves. Specialty wound care is available in our community, and in many cases, a second opinion can mean the difference between losing a limb and preserving one.
Ward Bowron, PT
Owner, Wyoming Wound Care
Venezuela, a lesson for America
Dear Casper,
While Venezuelans around the world are celebrating the removal of a brutal communist dictator, leftist are protesting in support of Maduro. How ironic from the “no kings” crowd?
The lesson for America is clear. The socialists in Venezuela promised the people all kinds of benefits in exchange for their votes. In response, the people traded away their freedom for the promises of free everything. They got neither.
Here in most of our nation, we instead choose rugged American individualism, which has made our country great, over the “warmth of collectivism” as promised to the people of New York City by their new mayor.
When this lie promoting government largess has been imposed time and again during the last two centuries, it has never worked out. Those who are voted into power take more and more for themselves and their friends until there is nothing left for the people and when the people complain, they are silenced or worse. They are imprisoned, tortured and killed in order to send a clear message to the general public that forces obedience through terror. Starvation and mass executions of over 100 million people worldwide is what socialism has brought to our world.
We cannot let this happen here in America or there will be no other nation left to have the courage to stop it.
Venezuelans in their country and those who fled that socialist utopia who are now citizens of the United States of America are celebrating the action that President Donald Trump has taken that no other American president had. All of us should be grateful as well for the removal from this South American nation of its corrupt, terrorist, drug-dealing, human-trafficking tyrant.
Ross Schriftman
Casper
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