"You Is Smart, You Is Kind, You Is Important"

I was watching "The Help" a couple of days ago with my daughter.  The movie has so many strong depictions of love and acceptance in a complex world that has a lot of barriers.  There were racial, sex, age, class and socioeconomic barriers depicted throughout the movie, most of which my daughter at the age of ten just couldn't understand.  At first I really didn't think about the relationship the movie could have to the field of nursing, but then it dawned on me that there are still many barriers in nursing today that do apply.

I started to think about the way Hilly and her friends treated the other characters, Celia, Skeeter, Minny, Aibileen, Mae Mobley and even Missus Walters.  The harshness of their comments and their deliberate actions all while looking the poised part.  This is how some new nurses are treated when they enter the profession, there is that same bitterness and the "eating of their young" that is unfortunately exhibited.  That ugly way the characters treated "the help" was handed down generationally, it was ignorance then and it continues to be today.

The help, like new nurses were not empowered, they were pushed down, talked down to, treated as second class citizens, talked about and threatened.

For me one of the most emotion and important scenes of the movie occurs when Abilieen and May Mobley are alone in the nursery when May Mobley repeats back the valuable words her "real momma", Abilieen, tells her, "You is smart, you is kind, you is important".

I believe that new nurses need that same reinforcement, guidance, reassurance and love.

While there are many change agents in the story, the collaboration between Skeeter and the help, standing up together brining light to the treatment these women endured is encouraging.  With so many nurses entering and leaving the workforce there is a changing tide and attitude.  Now is the time to remind our peers that: "You is smart, you is kind, you is important".