If I Had A Button

There are a lot of people in the world who feel powerless over their situations.  Imagine children living in homes where abuse occurs.  Imagine people in disaster zones, like Haiti, or more recently in Chile.  Imagine young people who live in under-developed countries where resources and jobs are not only scarce, there simply aren't any.  How will they live?  Criminally insane people and jihadists come from the likes of these.

And then there are the chronically sick.  Lately Sue's been experiencing chronic pain.  You get tired of being sick, and you get tired of being in pain, and you get tired of feeling powerless, and then wierd things start to happen.  Sometimes this feeling of powerlessness leads to despair.  Sometimes it leads to anger.  In Sue's case, she wants a button to push.  The way she put it last night, and again this morning, was something like this:  If I had a button to push, I'd push it.

In her case that's a double entendre.  It's frustrating, and it makes her mad, that she can't get her pain medications administered on time while she's in the hospital.  Even when she asks for them they don't get timely administered.  Sometimes, in hospitals, they will give you a little morphine pump that hangs on your I.V. stand and it has a little red button you hold in your hand and can push every so many minutes to self administer your pain meds.  Sue wants one of those, but so far they haven't given her one.

But the other sense of the button-to-push double entendre is more ominous (and here I specifically use the word "ominous" instead of "sinister").  Here we are talking about a Dr. Kevorkian, a.k.a. Dr. Death button.
I understand this sentiment of wanting a button to push, and I've always agreed with Dr. Kevorkian's assertion that "dying is not a crime."  Obviously not everyone agrees with this assertion, because the "good" doctor served eight years in prison for the crime of assisting terminally-ill patients expedite their own death.  He assisted 130 by his own account (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kevorkian ).

So we dealt with these very real sentiments as constructively as we could by co-writing a new verse to the Hammer Song (written and sung by Pete Seeger and later sung by Peter, Paul and Mary, "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning etc."  We now call it "The Button Song" and we had a silly good time singing it in Sue's isolation room this morning.

If I had a button,
I'd poke it in the morning,
I'd poke it in the evening,
And never let it out of my hand,
I'd poke out mor-or-phine,
I'd poke out i-ice-cream,
I'd poke out the love between
Our doctors and insurers,
All over this laaa-aaaa-aaa-and!


P.S.  When looking for a YouTube version of the hammer song, I came across this gem:
Hammer Song, by Obi