Author: MIKE MAGEE
As 2025 approaches, it’s price stopping for a moment and collecting our thoughts as a nation. Few would deny that we have been through lots over the last decade. And quite naturally, we humans tend in charge individuals fairly than circumstances (most of which were beyond our control) for creating an environment that appears to be falling apart before our eyes.
How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Is it possible to attain peace, contentment and security on this still young nation? To have accelerator technocrats, armed with Bitcoin and Martian fantasy, have shortened our moment in time that has been preserved for recovery from a deadly pandemic that has worn out one million of our fellow residents seemingly overnight?
Who can we turn to for answers now that now we have largely lost faith and trust in our legislators, our religious leaders and our journalists? And how exactly can we create a healthy nation? Certainly not by taking doctors and nurses offline miscarriages, and placing local bureaucrats in examination halls. Are they able to make life and death decisions? Are they trained to cope with people’s fears and worries? Do they know the right way to instill hope in parents who are actually “scared to death” because their child has just been diagnosed with cancer? Surely it’ll take greater than only a baseball cap with the word MAHA on it to heal this nation.
Historians suggest it’ll take a while. As Stanford University law professor Lawrence M. Friedman wrote History of American law“One hundred and sixty-nine years passed from Jamestown to the Declaration of Independence. The same amount of time separates 1776 and the end of World War II.
In those very early years leading as much as the formal declaration and creation of the United States as a nation, our various, then British, easily independent colonies did the whole lot of their power, first to survive, and then to prepare themselves into common communities with codified laws and regulations. It was “the study of social development as it unfolds over time” and is influenced by emotions, politics, and real-time economics. At the heart of the struggle (as now we have seen with the pandemic and now the vaccine controversy) has been the clash between individual rights and the rights of the collective community.
This clash of values has been clearly observed over the last five years of the Covid pandemic. In 2023 Columnist for the Washington Post.Dr. Leana Wen, asked: “Whose rights are most important? The individual who has to give up freedoms, or the people around him who want to reduce the risk of infection?”
This battle between “individual liberty and the good of the community” is ancient and timely, and continues to be a source of conflict wherever and at any time when people attempt some version of “nation building.” In our current case, it was much more complicated, deliberate disinformation and misinformation on an industrial scale. In the world “alternative facts”, who and what do you trust?
For the last five years, social trust in doctors and nurses managed to keep up a high level of public trust. They were literally a “bridge over troubled waters.” That’s why it was such an obvious mistake of public policy to forcibly separate them from the women they look after in half the states of this country. By jeopardizing the health of our women, now we have jeopardized the health of our democracy.
It’s price remembering that we, the people on these shores, have come a good distance. From the starting on off the coast of Virginia in 1607these early squatter settlements were essentially lawless – that’s, without rights. They also varied significantly in terms of entry dates and range of issues. Consider that the origins of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Georgia Colony were over 100 years apart. And as a historian Lawrence Friedman he noted: “The legal needs of a small settlement led by a clergyman, precariously clinging to the coast of an unknown continent, were fundamentally different from those of a bustling trading state.”
And yet here we’re, together, doing what we are able to to ward off against the man-made culture war unleashed in Florida to halt our human progress by pursuing policies that is not going to only widen the gap between wealthy and poor, but additionally reward technocrats -billionaires with unimaginable deregulation that may almost definitely put the health and safety of our residents in danger.
In some ways, the fight for civil and sensible conduct, bringing out shared values and striking a balance between individual freedom and sensible collective rules and regulations, stays our challenge.
No wonder RFK Jr. is under the microscope. His previous statements, full of his own “alternative facts”, struggles with addictions, celebrity searches and mixing good and bad ideas, have put him in a well-deserved hot seat. If we want trust, MAHA will not be the best option.
First, check History of American law. “It presents the achievements and failures of the American legal system in the context of the American world of commerce and work, family practices, and attitudes toward property, government, crime, and justice.” Medicine lives and breathes on the same interfaces.
How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Historians can say yes to all of the above, but additionally that the timing is ideal. We should make the most of this liquid opportunity and make the most of it. Public health policy, debated and formulated, may help us cope with our differences and make sensible selections 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 an writer CODE BLUE: Inside America’s medical industrial complex. (Gaj/2020)
