The trees are briskly bare. The weather is changing. The days of sunshine are a thing of the past.
A virus is raging in vehement form and remarkable fashion throughout the land, and we are so moved. We are moved to anger. We are moved to change. We are moved to transition in time and to a new season of promise. The clouds are taking a new shape. The sky is unrecognizable. The land seems as foreign and undiscovered as distant shores for even the most cosmopolitan and traveled of us. We do not recognize our country. We do not recognize our land. We are not, globally, and even amongst ourselves, who we once were and knew ourselves to be.
America is not herself. She is febrile. She is so sick. I fear she is teetering gingerly on the brink of expiration. She is persistently tachycardia, and her breath sounds are labored. She lies in stupor and repose in a bed in a health care setting that seems to hold for her no plausible cure, no treatment, and no restoration of her to her former glory and level of activity. She is ataxic, overcome with pallor and pulseless drive for recovery, and there are some at the helm of her care that are immensely inept and dare not dwell in scientific fact, and it’s crucial employ. They dare refuse the evidence and thus seek to hasten her demise.
She is such a renowned patient. She is wealthy, rich, pluralistic, beautiful, kind, just, delightful, pleasant, and charming. She has a place in this world as a pinnacle of society. She has friends and knows true enmity. She is necessary to the longevity of so many whose survival depends on her. She is much too busy working for goodness and democracy in the world. She doesn’t have time to die. Her springtime is gone.
It’s wintertime in America. Her body is cooling with disease, sickness, and the impending treachery of death and destruction. Her cough is productive. Her chest pangs her. Her muscles ache, and she has lost her smell and taste. She is sick, and her illness, unfortunately, is from within. Her own doesn’t like her and threatens with painstaking precision to take her down. She is being destroyed from within with fierce disregard of who she is and by those at the very peak of her elected leadership.
Yet, tomorrow is coming. It’s Friday evening on hilly Golgotha right now. Sunday morning is just around the corner, and in less than a month, prayerfully, Sunday will come. America will be resurrected from the ill-fated grasps of viral disease and depression to her former prosperity and future glory days to come. If her innards work together and simultaneously to change the status quo of her inept care and treatment, she will reach spontaneous return of circulatory function. It will not be easy, but it is a possible accomplishment if only her individual parts respond to do what is right for her total self, holistically, and with compassion. She will be renewed. She can reach renaissance. In a new springtime that is next month, our dearest America will be revived, and how she so necessitates revival today, tomorrow, and on the day after tomorrow.
We all have the opportunity to heal this cherished and beloved patient, who means so much to all of us. We possess the most potent salve for her disease, and it is rudimentary yet appears to be so complex because some seek, deviously, to suppress our individual and collective ability to exercise it via multiple tactics to disenfranchise many and the few. We can vote to heal America. We can vote to help America. We can vote to foster a new sense of hope in America with a vote for positive and reasonably effective change. We can alter her plan of management and treatment in a way that fosters only the best of outcomes.
It is getting late in the evening. It’s getting colder outside with each coming day. America is dying. America is slowly but surely passing all the way away. To all Americans, we have the right and responsibility to save our beloved America once and for all. For America, beloved, is a patient of us all.
Earl Stewart, Jr. is an internal medicine physician in Atlanta, Georgia, a 2023 Doximity Digital Health Fellow, and a 2023 Climate and Health Equity Fellow (CHEF) with the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health. He can be reached on E.S.J., M.D., LinkedIn, Twitter @EarlStewartJr, and Doximity.
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