You can learn a lot sitting in an emergency room for 6+ hours. It’s a multi-sensory educational experience where the student/observer learns through sight, sound, and immersion the slings and arrows of a system designed to reduce human beings into insensate meat.

People come and go in various states of distress. An elderly woman pushing a bloody rag to her face, a girl in her 20s crying while clutching her stomach, a haggard couple with a non-verbal autistic son who wants to make a run for it, crying babies, those carried, pushed or rolled in, and the hollow faces of The Waiting.

I’m waiting. I’m waiting for my mother who is with my father who is in distress. One of the Docs told him, “You surrender your dignity when you go into a hospital.” This is quite the commentary on American “healthcare.”

Amazing how both pieces of a compound word can be completely the opposite of reality. There is nothing healthy nor caring about our system. Individuals are doing their very best, no doubt, but the overall system is soul-crushingly dehumanizing. Nurses, orderlies, social workers, security guards, overworked ER docs… people who got into this business to help others try their damnedest under ridiculous circumstances.

In the waiting room, the people come and go talking about their HMO…

…do I dare? Do I dare ask what’s the holdup? Do I dare? Do I dare? Do I dare bring the moment to its crisis and ask why the hell we’re in here on hour number 5 of what should have been an in-and-out?

Oh do not ask, “what is it?”

Let us go and make our visit

In the waiting room the anxieties come and go, at an ever-increasing ratio…

And indeed there will be time…

Time. Hospitals are giant suckers of time. Temporal vacuums of industrial treatment. Apologies to the other T.S. … Not me. Eliot. He had a lot to say about the passage of time. He had a lot to say about the human condition. He wrote of Wastelands, Love Songs, Palm Sunday, and the naming of cats. I wonder what he would think of this situation… I wonder what he would say about the person who first entered the waiting room vs. the person who is still sitting in the waiting room. Am I the person I was 5+ hours ago? Or did I leave him in the car?

I’m down a poetic rabbit hole because I left my tablet, my laptop, and pretty much anything useful to pass the time at home. I have my cellphone, a small Field Notes notebook, and a pencil. I also have a head full of worry and an alternating current of anxiety and impatience.

But I refuse to let the inner fury bubble over onto my fellow humans. We’re all in the same waiting room. We’re all suffering together. I get up to let a man sit with his daughter. I don’t do this because I’m a good person. I do this because showing a kindness makes me feel good. When I steal glances at the fellow waiters, I make sure to flash kindness and not annoyance or dread. It’s the least I can do.

On the news, the fascist-in-chief, the felon in charge of the country, is going out of his way to anger, inconvenience, and flat out ruin the lives of people he deems inconvenient. He and his hate-blinded minions are enacting some crusade at the behest of billionaires to something something make something great or something. Massive numbers of Americans were seduced into burying any trace of empathy and humanity in order to be a part of some exclusive patriotic posse.

I shake my head at the waste of it all. We’re a nation of bullies and toadies.

Imagine for a moment an emergency room where, when you walk in, you are greeted with care, genuine empathetic care. Imagine a system that treated you like the precious gem that you are. Imagine humanity.

One can dream, can’t one?

No. Instead we are stuck with a crypto coup, a hitlerian fascist, a WHITEWASHING of anything against his sensibilities and a cadre of wannabe brownshirts standing back and standing by.

We are now subject to a government that will do nothing to address the horror of an urban waiting room, and that is heartbreakingly terrifying. We are a populace full of enough people willing to deny their humanity in order to be part of some mindless movement.

And my heart is breaking into pieces as my 82-year-old father lays in an ER all but forgotten by a system stretched beyond the limits of empathy. My main concern right now is him, but I have a hard time separating the micro from the macrocosm. I can’t even wish away the present for the future… I have fleeting hopes of midterm elections in 2026 that disempower these nazis… but I realize in 2026 we’ll all be older. Especially my 82-year-old father who has cancer. I am loathe to wish away precious time. I silently hope that Canada invades, takes over, and gives us healthcare for all and empathy.

In the meantime, all we can do is try and be kind to each other.