By MIKE MAGEE
As 2025 kicks off, it’s wise to pause, and gather our thoughts as a nation. Few would argue that we’ve been through a lot over the past decade. And quite naturally, we humans are prone to blame individuals rather than circumstances (most of which have been beyond our control) for creating an environment that feels as if it is unraveling before our eyes.
How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Is peace, contentment, and security achievable in this still young nation? Have accelerationist technocrats, armed with bitcoins and Martian fantasy, short-circuited our moment in time that had been preserved for recovery from a deadly pandemic that eliminated a million of our fellow citizens seemingly overnight?
Who do we turn to for answers, now that we’ve largely lost faith and trust in our politicians, our religious leaders, and our journalists? And how exactly do you create a healthy nation? Certainly not by taking doctors and nurses offline for miscarriages, and placing local bureaucrats in exam rooms. Are they prepared to deal with life and death decisions? Are they trained to process human fear and worry? Do they know how to instill hopefulness in parents who are literally “scared to death” because their child has just been diagnosed with cancer? It certainly must require more than a baseball cap with MAHA on it to heal this nation.
Historians suggest this will take time. As Stanford Professor of Law, Lawrence M. Friedman, wrote in A History of American Law, “One hundred and sixty-nine years went by between Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence. The same length of time separates 1776 and the end of World War II.”
During those very early years that preceded the formal declaration and formation of the United States as a nation, our various, then British colonies, fluidly and independent of each other, did their best first to survive, and then to organize into shared communities with codified laws and regulations. It was “a study of social development unfolding over time” impacted by emotions, politics and real-time economics. At the core of the struggle (as we saw with the pandemic, and now the vaccine controversy) was a clash between the rights of the individual and those of the collective community.
This clash of values has been playing out in full view over the past five years of the Covid pandemic. In 2023, Washington Post columnist, Dr. Leana Wen, asked, “Whose rights are paramount? The individual who must give up freedoms, or those around them who want to lower infection risk?”
This battle between “individual liberty and communal good” is ancient and current at the same time, and still a source of conflict wherever and whenever humans attempt some version of “nation building.” In our current case, it has been further complicated purposeful misinformation and misdirection on an industrial scale. In a world of “alternative facts,” who and what do you trust?
Through the past five years, public trust in doctors and nurses have managed to maintain high levels of public trust. Literally, they have been “a bridge over troubled waters.” That is why it has been such a glaringly obvious public policy blunder to forcefully separate them from the women they care for in half of the states of this nation. By compromising the health of our women, we have compromised the health of our democracy.
It is useful to recall that we humans on these shores have come a long way. From the beginning on the shores of Virginia in 1607, these early wild settlements were essentially lawless – that is without laws. They also were wildly different in their dates of entry and their range of issues. Consider that more than 100 years separated the beginnings of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the colony of Georgia. And as historian Lawrence Friedman noted, “The legal needs of a small settlement run by clergyman clinging precariously to the coast of an unknown continent were fundamentally different from the needs of a bustling commercial state.”
And yet, here we are together, doing our best to push back against a manmade culture war, ignited in Florida, and designed to halt our human progress, as we pursue policies that will not only widen the gap between rich and poor, but also reward billionaire technocrats with unimaginable deregulation that will almost certainly place our citizens health and safety at risk.
In many ways, the struggle to act in a civil and wise manner, that mines common values, and finds a balance between individual freedom and wise collective rules and regulations, remains our hill to climb.
Not surprisingly, RFK Jr. finds himself under a microscope. His past pronouncements, replete with his own “alternative facts,” struggles with addiction, celebrity seeking, and mixing of good and bad ideas have placed him in a well-deserved hot seat. If trust is what we need, he may not be the best choice for MAHA.
As a fact starter, check out The History of American Law. It “presents the achievements and failures of the American legal system in the context of America’s commercial and working world, family practices, and attitudes toward property, government, crime, and justice.” Medicine lives and breaths at these very same interfaces.
How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Historians might say yes to all of the above, but also that the timing is perfect. We should advantage this fluid opportunity, and make the most of it. Public Health policy, debating it and formulating it, can help us mange our differences, and make wise choices for our still young nation. This is because Public Health exists at the intersection of Law and Medicine.
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)
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