The New American Passionate

This piece is a reflection on the herbalist Paul Bergner’s article on the New American Patient written in the 1990s, updated here for 2022.

The New American Patient is overfed and undernourished, broken away from the natural cycles of the seasons, the days, and the rhythmic pulls of the body. The New American Patient is as polluted as the environment, as tainted as the social media and toxic politics they feed upon. The corruption in this culture inescapably permeates their being. The New American Patient longs to connect but is too tired, too busy, too stressed, too bitter, too mistrusting. Connection occurs technologically, superficially, and constantly, leaving a sense of over-whelm and over-stimulation. The quiet moments in which rebirth and regeneration take seed are supplanted by an artificial jungle choking out the light.

The New American Patient has lost relationship with the body in the same way we have lost relationship with Earth, and thus pollute both out of the sake of convenience, lack of knowledge or simply apathy, and through the subversion of ancestral memory. The New American Patient robs from the future, and is forgetting of the past. The New American Patient is solitary. The New American Patient is lost.

The New America Patient is expected to navigate a broken system: broken government, broken education, broken food sources, broken healthcare. Industry and Capitalism are the driving currents into which the New American Patient is pulled away, and drowning. If the world is our house, then our house is on fire; if our bodies reflect the world, our bodies are burning. Chronic systemic inflammation from lack of nourishing foods, lack of quality sleep, lack of clean air and water, lack of meaningful spiritual connection to ourselves and others is burning us to the ground. And nothing will be done by the systems that should be safeguarding us until the fire is raging out of control.

The New American Patient needs to transform from the Patient, from someone who is passive-suffering-compliant to someone who is active-creating-becoming. Instead of suffering passively, if suffering is inevitable then there must be a movement forward, a movement through in order for healing to occur.

Evolution, development, transformation must take place as the New American Patient is dying. The New American Patient must find regeneration and metamorphosis in order to survive.

The word “passion” means to suffer, being derived from the Latin word pati, from which the word “patient” is also rooted. I offer a new term, the New American Passionate. Instead of suffering in silence as a good Patient does, the Passionate burns with suffering, sparking action and movement.

The New American Passionate must satisfy hunger with foods that nourish, and actively take part in the process of their own nourishment. The New American Passionate must take in the bright clear air of the forests and fight for the continued existence of these forests. The New American Passionate must not settle for a healthcare system that forces reliance upon another who does not intimately know the workings of someone else’s body, mind, and spirit. The New American Passionate cannot wait patiently. The New American Passionate must make some noise.

The New American Passionate must take health and life into their own hands. We must become the New American Passionates. There is no more time. The world is burning.