Author: Nanadadzie Ghansah

From that Cave to the Cave

World Poetry Day!

To commemorate the day, I present:

From that Cave to the Cave

I was pulled out of a cave,
Screaming my head off
An unknown future to brave
Seemed to me quite tough.
I crawled into the bright light
Till I finally found my own path.
Sometimes all seemed right
Until one faced it’s deep wrath.

A dear, loved one I found
Other loved ones we made.
To the top I was bound
My star would never fade.
Then the body began to crumble
As Time it’s ugly head reared
Quietly into another cave to tumble
As Life from me finally veered.

Edgy presents “The Art of the Sultry”

Welcome to the launch edition of EDGY!, a magazine that aims to celebrate the confluence of pictures and words.

This first issue has the theme, “The Art of the Sultry”. It aims to celebrate the sexuality and allure of the woman. 

These are qualities that can be flaunted and cheapened or kept quite suggestive and powerful. It is in the latter state that they create the rather powerful Art of the Sultry. It is the total control that is wielded in this state that can lend women an amazing control over their lives as well as those of the opposite sex. 

It is not the fragrant selling of the human body for financial gain but a rather, a delicate dance of subtly hinting at what may be in dress, speech, the way a woman walks or even dances. The promise of things to come. The delayed gratification. 

Whatever the reason, this promise of things to come can induce a great deal of sexual tension and energy in men that can have amazing positive potential. 

In simpler times, the desire to get noticed as a suitor by standing out from the herd drove men to impress a woman through noble acts and deeds and unfortunately, sometimes of great folly. In the process, these great acts often enhanced the lot and fortunes of the man in society and made women wielders of immense power and drivers as well as creators of society’s growth.

The saying, “Behind every great man is a strong woman” may well have stemmed from this interaction.

So should today’s emancipated woman still practice this art as means to an end?

Being a man, I do not think it is my place to answer that question but I bet even today, there are many women who have mastered this art and practice it quite well.

Unwise men who do not recognize the potential this interaction carries may destroy it with force and their egos. They may even feel threatened. Impatient women who are blind to the delicacy of the process may rush into it, destroying their prospects. 

It is definitely an art. The Art of the Sultry.

Below is the link
(Note: This magazine contains images that exhibited some nudity!)

Edgy presents “The Art of the Sultry”

Enjoy!

The Physiology of Anger

“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
– Buddha

Anger is a strong emotional response to a perceived slight, threat and hurt. It impacts the whole body and mind.
Emotions are controlled by the limbic and autonomic nervous systems. Whereas the limbic system seems to be the engine of emotions, the autonomic nervous system carries out the effects of our emotions eg. fight or flight.
The complex set of structures called the limbic system are situated on both sides of the thalamus, just under the cerebrum. It includes the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, and several other nearby areas. The amygdala are two almond-shaped structures that are responsible for our emotions.
They identify threats or hurts and send out a warning sign to the autonomic nervous system. The efficiency of the system is such that it can get us to act before the cortex can modify it’s commands. Why is that important? Well, if we react to emotions as directed by the limbic and autonomic nervous systems, our actions are without thought and judgement. Our actions are without consideration of consequences. It is the cortex that gets us to consider our actions.
Thus an angry person runs the risk of action without thought and judgement.
As one gets angry, the muscles tense up. Epinephrine (adrenaline) is released giving one a burst of energy and the desire to take immediate action. The focus narrows, the heart rate and blood pressure increase, blood flow to the arms and legs go up. More neurotransmitters are released putting the angry person in a state of very high arousal. One is ready for a fight.
It is at this point that the cortex is supposed to step in and get one to asses the reasonableness of the planned reaction and consequences. The ability to step back from this angry state and look at things sanely takes some training. It can come from our upbringing, our belief systems or techniques one has learnt (breathing exercises).
If one is able to step back, reassess the situation and take control of the emotion, the cool down phase starts. Now this phase takes a while to get one to the resting, calm state of affairs. It can take days. The problem is, if the cause of the anger re-emerges in this phase, the threshold for getting angry is much lower. The intensity is higher and the chances of acting on the emotion increases.
Beside getting one to act without reason and judgement, anger also makes people think in more negative and prejudiced terms about outsiders. It makes one deal more in stereotypes and hinders analytical thinking, unlike sadness or fear. There is the tendency to place blame on another person for one’s misery. Angry people also tend to find causes for issues that are charged with anger. So an angry person is wont to listen to the pundit who preaches anger-illiciting reasons for societal ills.
Anger is however not wholly a negative emotion. When harnessed well, it can lead to positive action due to arousal. Arousal is a very important human condition. Human action of any sort is preceded by arousal. Every athlete will tell you that a certain level of arousal is needed prior to competition. Moderate arousal levels help the brain to learn and enhance memory, concentration, and performance. So controlling one’s anger stems the hasty action but leaves a level of arousal that can be harnessed to effect real change, create or even learn. When arousal is excessive as in the angry state, it limits our ability to concentrate, learn and remember. Any surprise most do not remember an angry outburst?
Also, anger can be feigned as a strategy to manipulate or even affect the outcome of a negotiation.
The powerful emotion that is anger is meant really to be a force for good. This force can only be realized if we can tame it through the right coping strategies like behavioral therapy and meditation. Then one angry person may have minimal effects socially, but an angry populace can have massive detrimental societal ramifications.

To Diss or Not To Diss

The man wrote beautiful lines like:

“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held”

He also wrote some of the most wordy and flowery put-downs ever. A certain trauma surgeon I know has nothing on the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare. He wrote 154 sonnets, 54 plays and some of the coolest disses ever.

Check this one out from All’s Well That Ends Well (Act 3, Scene 6):
“A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.”
Reminds me of someone famous..😳
Or this one from As You Like It (Act 2, Scene 7):
“Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage.”
Ouch!
Or my personal favorite from The Taming of the Shrew (Act 3, Scene 3):
“Away, you three-inch fool! “😂
I keep wondering, “what is three inches?”
Or this one from Timon of Athens (Act 4, Scene 3):
“I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands.”
Now that’s mean.
Now this one is special; from Troilus and Cressida (Act 2, Scene 1):
“Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows “
Jeez, elbows?
To round it off, from Henry IV Part 1 (Act 2, Scene 4):
“You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish–O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!”
Now that is dissing.

Words! Aren’t they awesome?

This Healthcare Thing

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
– President Donald Trump, February 27, 2017

Outside the military and veterans, our congressmen and senators and recipients of Medicare, all other Americans fall into one of three classes where health insurance is concerned:
Those who receive employer-sponsored plans, the freelancers who need to buy their own and the poor who cannot afford it.
Under Obamacare, each of these groups saw significant changes.
Depending on whether the changes were predominantly positive or negative depended on factors like political affiliation, profession, socio-economic class and age.
Those under the employer-sponsored plans saw plans that added on things like pediatric dental and vision care, mental-health care and inclusion of children up to age 26.
For the freelancers, the exchanges suddenly allowed the purchasing of affordable plans plus the benefit of getting coverage for pre-exiting conditions.
The biggest boon was felt by the fraction that was too poor to afford insurance yet ineligible for Medicaid. This was done through expansion of Medicaid. The poster child of that is Kentucky.
In 2013, about 13 % of the non-Medicare population had no form of health insurance. By 2015, that fraction had fallen to less than 7%. The estimate is about 300,000 to 500,000 have benefitted from Medicaid expansion in the state.
As with everything, the devil is in the details and in this case, that devil is twofold – money and politics.
Paying for the Medicaid expansion is a bone of contention between the states and the federal government.
Also, there were significant tax increases on those who make more than $250,000 a year to pay for subsidies for those who couldn’t afford to buy insurance on the exchanges.
Then is the fact that companies with 50 or more full-time employees are compelled under the law to insure all employees, a condition that deterred a lot of companies from hiring.
Politically, the desire to annihilate all things Obama is also driving the desire to repeal and replace.
Trumpcare might lead to less tax increases, be less onerous on employers and remove the Medicaid burden BUT will it maintain the same level of insured Americans?
From what is out there, I doubt it but since it is just a framework, the devil will be in play again – in the details.

It’s All About The Product

“Take care of your people and they will take care of your customers.” – JW Marriott

Every busines offers a product. Offering the best version of that product is the main aim of any business..
A hospital is no different. It offers a product. It’s called “Patient Care”
Every hospital aims to offer the best patient care versus all the other hospital competing with it for business.
The most immediate face of patient care in any hospital aren’t the doctors, administrators or janitors. They are the nurses. They are the most immediate parameter used by patients to rate care in any hospital. The care they give will make or break a hospital.
So a hospital that aims to win business and be seen as great cannot afford to skimp on nurses. That hospital will aim to get the best and most experienced nurses. They will also get younger nurses who hopefully can take the place of the older nurses one day but they will not be the dominating group in the nursing pool. The older and more experienced nurses should be.
Then you come to the doctors. You want the best. If you have good ones, you strive to keep them. If they threaten to leave, you try to meet them halfway. If they are surgeons, you stroke their ego – you may need both hands! Then remember the product you offer is patient care and you need good nurses and doctors to achieve that.

Interestingly, there is a trend in the US that boggles the mind. Hospital administrators seem to have forgotten what the product is. They’ve forgotten what really matters. They are bogged down by the numbers so much that they have lost sight of what their product is – Patient Care!
So some lay off nurses, get rid of good doctors, seeing personnel cost as a liability instead of an asset and in the process, worsen patient care. They nickel-and-dime the quality of their product to death – no pun intended.Personnel costs may be a problem when one is dealing with the Post Office but in a hospital, that is the key for a great product.
Now this happens because a lot of hospital administrators honestly do not know and understand the ins-and outs of patient care. Running a hospital is not the same as running, say, UPS or Walmart. They are both businesses but one deals with people – sick people – and there is a high degree of unpredictability that the numbers do not always reflect. That is the problem classically-trained business minds have. It is no accident that physician-owned-and-ran hospitals do better than non-physician-owned ones. It is also interesting that the longer an administrator has been at a position in a hospital, they better the decision-making gets. This is because they are forced to develop relationships with the doctors and nurses and thus acquire a feel for that unpredictability.

Which brings me to my point – that hospitals should be run by physicians and nurses, supported by a finance team. This should be a physician who does clinical work not a desk-hugger. It is the only way that the product, patient care, will always come first and not some arcane numbers. Having a finance team will reduce any excesses that physicians are sometimes prone to when new medical technology or drugs are available. The vision of a hospital will also be more in line with the real needs of patients in a community and the future of medicine not the numbers. The other doctors and nurses in the hospital are more apt to find a listening ear in a physician CEO than a classic MBA daydreaming about numbers and spreadsheets.

Sure, not every physician can be a good administrator but honestly, looking at what is out there now and how physicians and nurses see being treated all over, what do we have to lose?

I Told You So

When the first president, George Washington, was sworn in as president in April of 1789, no political parties existed.
About 3 years later, bankers and businessmen in the North, supportive of the policies of the then Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, would start the Federalist Party. The Federalists believed in a sound fiscal policy and nationalism and really reflected the interests of the commercial North.
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, formed the Democratic-Republican Party. Jefferson was against the centralizing policies of the Federalists. He wanted “states rights” for the agrarian South.

Even though Washington didn’t belong to either party, he tended to be sympathetic to the Federalist positions.
Over time, a deep animosity developed between the two parties based on ideology. This animosity really reared it’s head during the French revolution (1789 – 1799) and in Washington’s second term.
The French revolution ultimately led to a war between France and Great Britain. Hamilton wanted the US to support the Great Britain while Jefferson supported the French revolutionaries. Washington stayed out of the fray, keeping the US neutral. However, when Britain captured US ships trading with France, Washington was forced to negotiate with Britain. This galled the Democratic-Republicans.
The rancor that ensued forever tainted the view Washington had about political parties.Even though he was asked to lead the nation for a third term, he refused. He wanted to escape the hate in the capital to the solace of his farm in Virginia.

In early 1796, with the help of Hamilton, Washington started working on his Farewell Address. It was published in the Daily American Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, in September, 1796.
In it, he advised American citizens to view themselves as a cohesive unit and avoid political parties and issued a special warning to be wary of attachments and entanglements with other nations.
These words from the address are quite poignant even today, even prophetic:
“They (political parties) serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

I wonder what the first president would say if he was to come alive in 2017 America. Probably he would utter these words that the writer Gore Vidal said are the four most beautiful words in the English language: “I told you so!”

The New King

The new King was different. As soon as he ascended the throne, he banished all the wise men. He didn’t need their counsel, he claimed.
The strangest thing though were his pronouncements. A week after he was made king, he claimed that the old queen had tried to poison him. The only problem was that the old queen was blind and deaf and could hardly walk.
The he announced that the men from the Northern Province were planing a revolt. What made this astonishing was that the Northern Province had the most loyalists to the monarchy and so the whole nation wondered why he said that.
Then shortly after that, he claimed that the people of the Ajia Kingdom to the east were bringing disease into his kingdom. The King of Ajia were angry and pulled his envoy.
Over all in the kingdom, everyone wondered why he said the things he did. They all feared what he might say next or which other kingdom he might anger.

One afternoon as the King walked through the royal gardens, he saw a beggar hunched near a tree. He wondered how the beggar got into the royal gardens and asked his guards to remove him. As the guards headed towards the poor man, he started crying out loud:
“O King, have mercy on a hungry and suffering soul. All I want is some food.”
The guards grabbed him and started hauling him away but his cries got louder.
“Stop!’, ordered the King.
The guards stopped, dropping the poor beggar like a sack of potatoes.
“Now why should I give you anything?”, asked the King haughtily.
“O My King, because I have a gift for you”, the beggar answered.
“You have a gift for me?”, the King asked, sneering.
“Yes, I do”, the poor beggar answered.
“Well then, let me see it. If it is worth my while, I’ll feed and cloth you. If not, you are in deep trouble”, the King barked.
“It is a story, my Lord, a wonderful story indeed”, the beggar said fearlessly.
“A story! A story!”, the King said as he burst out laughing. “Well, let me hear your story then, you wretch”. The King’s curiosity got the better of him.
And so the beggar began to tell the story:
“There was a Shepherd Boy who tended his sheep at the foot of a mountain near a dark forest. It was lonely for him, so he devised a plan to get a little company. He rushed down towards the village calling out ‘Wolf, Wolf,’ and the villagers came out to meet him. This pleased the boy so much that a few days after he tried the same trick, and again the villagers came to his help. Shortly after this a Wolf actually did come out from the forest. The boy cried out ‘Wolf, Wolf,’ still louder than before. But this time the villagers, who had been fooled twice before, thought the boy was again lying, and nobody came to his aid. So the Wolf ate all the sheep in the boy’s flock.”
There was total silence in the garden after the beggar finished speaking.
“That is the story, my Lord”, he added.
The King looked sternly at the beggar, opened his mouth to speak and then thought better of it. Finally he said to the guards, “Feed him, clothe him and throw him out of the kingdom like all the other wise men”.
Then he turned and walked back into the palace.

Some claim that after that encounter, the King made no more incredulous statements. Others claim that nothing really changed and that he angered the King of Ajia with his claims so much so, that war broke out between the two nations. Yet there are those who claim that the encounter never happened.
Whatever the case is, those who have ears, let them hear.

A New Ghanaian

As Mother Ghana turns 60, can we ask for a new Ghanaian? An angry and restless Ghanaian? Not the pseudo-humble and meek type but the confident and demanding species with an aggressive genotype? The type who gets angry at mediocrity, harvests that anger, like Kojo Anan Ankomah says, and uses it to build our nation? Whose creativity knows no bounds, is unfettered and roams like an angry and hungry lion in the Serengeti? Can we?
That restless, angry, demanding, aggressive yet creative Ghanaian will have a mantra. It will be that remixed verse from the famous 1997 “Think Different” Apple campaign:
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push Ghana forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change Ghana, are the ones who do.”
God, as you bless our homeland Ghana, please give us that Ghanaian too!