le 10
janvier 2015
Wielding pens. Waving swords. Stopping
traffic.
I’ve believed that for a long time, not
just in the old adage that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” As a writer
and a doctor, one of my greatest hopes and exultations in earning my MD was the
power and respect the degree bestows, for better or for worse, deserved or not,
to be a spoken/outspoken advocate, and to be published for it.
I use writer in the sense of “someone for
whom the act of writing is not an option; someone for whom writing is as necessary
to existence as is oxygen.” I use doctor in the sense of not just the
traditional physician and caretaker for a body and a person, but in the Latin
derivation of “doceo, docere – to teach.”
Almost every sentence and every paragraph
here starts with I. There is, too, now, “Je suis Charlie/ I am Charlie,” for
what it’s worth, for belief in and disbelief against the recent attacks in
Paris of freedom of speech.
I have recently felt ill, paralyzed,
galvanized by moment and by turn by the deaths of Ebola, inequalities in Africa
and health systems in Africa, prejudice, hatred, and fear of those of African
descent living in the United States, focus on a few individuals sick in a
country where they can be taken care of versus thousands upon thousands in
countries whose fragile infrastructures are being destroyed; by injustices
perpetrated by institutional racism across the country and most poignantly,
most close to home in New York, a system in which I, physicians in general,
anyone in a hierarchical position of power is complicit, where I weakly, as a
primary care physician, offer flu shots and preventative measures to my
patients who, in the South Bronx, are more likely to go to prison than to
college, who could be stopped and frisked on the basis of nothing, who fear and
are injustly feared on a daily basis.
