In Favour of Indentured Servitude

Utopia, Scepticism, and Camping in Kent

“Often, it is necessary to deny the lived experience of minority groups, no matter how real and valid said experience might be, if we are to get anywhere at all,” was something my father was fond of saying when we were struggling to get out the door for a camping trip to Kent.

My brother, an extremely sensitive boy with a multitude of supposed health problems, would complain endlessly that the Bermuda grass surrounding our habitual camping spot provoked his hay fever. While it would have been easy for my father to choose another camping spot, he refused to do so, saying that if we were to kowtow to every discomfort we ever felt, we would never get to Kent. The Bermuda grass, in truth, was never identified as an allergen for my brother. Nor was it ever established that he suffered from any sort of pollen-based allergy. But this was only because my father refused to entertain the idea by taking him to a doctor. He believed that, far from diagnosing diseases, doctors were in the business of bestowing them and that, were a disease never pronounced by a medical man’s lips, it would never be allowed to come into existence.