While it is impossible to conceptualize America in a manner that honors the wild diversity of hundreds of millions of lives, it is clear our country is in need of healing. To this end, it may be helpful to think of our shared Americanness as a body, just like our own.

Our collective American body is not beautiful. It falls on the soiled couch, covered with rolls of soft fat, sweating from every pore, full of churning anxiety, beet red with directionless rage, glued to the screaming television, all while sitting on someone else’s frail, bony hand.

This body is yours and mine. Though I may try to ignore this fact, my Americanness looms behind me as I stand in the mirror. This vision is my birthright and my inheritance. It will never go away, and I feel something must be done to make this body well.

Regardless of what each citizen may look like or believe in, America today is symbolically reduced to the MAGA-clad white man. This red-hatted figure is hateful and bigoted. Just so, he is grotesquely sick, desperately in need of care for which he does not know how to ask.

I watch, jaw clenched with unease, as our universities and think tanks expend tremendous intellectual capital sketching out the systemic contours which oppress the American body and perpetuate its suffering. Studies of classism, sexism and racism through frameworks of neoliberalism, environmentalism or anything else, tell us what is wrong. These inquiries are largely deconstructive projects, and though unquestionably valid, they do not feed people.

In his work on reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates explicitly declines to provide a framework for how assets might be redistributed. This is not an argumentative weakness. It is an acknowledgement of the limited operational scope of identity-based historiography. Politics, unlike scholarship, must be governed by triage. There is enough suffering here and now; justice for the dead cannot be a priority, however noble.

Despite America’s obvious undeservedness of our fealty (this seems the default position among educated youth, one I found myself adopting despite myself), how might we aid her? I have one response which ignores the question altogether: detachment. I float along, listening to jazz and smoking naughty herbs, as the American body cries out in something halfway between blasphemy and a plea for help. I don’t see the flag over the quad. I have no appetite for petty politics. I’m happy, and I don’t give a shit. I’ve come to regard these ideas—which flow through my mind whenever I am faced with an issue of even trifling significance—with a strange, understanding shame. The American body needs love, from anyone, anywhere, and, being American, demands it brutishly.

Always, the American body returns in the mirror. Desperate, grabbing at my neck, it is full of hurt. And though I want to help it, I don’t know how.

Many think the body worthless. They shout, “America deserves nothing! It should be left to destroy itself!”

Now, I am a lefty socialist at heart but a damn right winger compared to the friendly neighborhood anarchist. I insist that a liberal democracy, at least on paper, is a hard and lucky thing to get, and I hold onto hope that ours can be salvaged from whatever rubble may come.

I find myself clinging to this position by a spider’s thread. Reading the Epstein files was so terrifying because it felt almost expected. America is run by evil men who deserve horrific things I couldn’t possibly detail in print. But these men are not America. If Trump, the Epstein files and the militarized streets are the real America, then there is no place left for hope.

If, as Eddie Glaude asserts, “Blaming President Trump is too easy; this is Us,” we are to blame for America’s sickness. Though this sentiment of collective accountability is attractive, it is subtly reductionist. The MAGA front is rife with decent people deceived by propagandistic smoke and mirrors who now find their basic necessities taken by the very regime they helped institute. The sickness which besets the American body surely originates from within, but it is neither wholly consumptive nor borne of common consent.

Glaude is right to call out to us in unison; but we, the American people, are united not by some abstract blame for America’s ills but a positive responsibility to do something. We beer-pissing hillbillies, 300 million in number, have no more frontiers to trample in the quest for national individuation. Our country has nowhere left to turn but inward, where we must slowly chisel Lady Liberty out from the bloated, sick man in the mirror. Though it may feel wrong to aid this body, the American body needs care, not forgiveness.

A special notice hangs on my wall. It was mailed to me on my 18th birthday. American boys, becoming men, receive a letter from the federal government mandating registration for a hypothetical draft. When the U.S. declares total war, perhaps my name will be drawn. I have “War Is Hell” scrawled on the notice in permanent marker. Still, if my name were called, I would go, moved by forces I do not fully understand and against my better reasoning.

Does this render me a slave to an evil master? An indoctrinated fool? I am either strong enough to heed a call to arms or too weak to act on my knowing better. Maybe America will lay down its arms and peacefully turn Iran over to its people, and we can all live in white picket fence mansions in Never Never Land.

On the topic of realism, I was recently chatting with a young lady in a polka dotted scarf. A community leader, she described the ethos of her personal mission as solidarity. I don’t think this is possible anymore. In the midst of so much blood and starvation, I fear symbolic welfare has lost its meaning.

What can solidarity mean to the mother who cannot feed her child? At best, such demonstrations are useless, at worst unabashedly patronizing. I recently saw a video of a striking blonde woman walking through New York while eating a croissant.

“Merry Christmas,” she said to a shivering homeless man as she passed.

“F*** you! F*** you saying ‘Merry Christmas’ for?” he shouted back, eyes wide.

I see his point, and I bet he would have thanked her for some change. Our responsibility to heal the American body must take root in materially supporting our unique communities and stories. A thousand distinct struggles together in great chorus will ring out as one note of change. This romanticized vision of national healing sounds somewhat ridiculous when I think about the impossibility of the work ahead. I am 20 and cannot yet do much to heal the body. One day, with enough capital and influence, I could build a homeless shelter to the moon. But one day there won’t be an America left to save. If we wait for ideological purity, our heels will remain on the ground at the moment of catharsis.

I find myself taking a leap of faith, trusting the homeless man will not shoot up with the dollar I set in his tin cup. To act in the face of imperfection is not symbolic. It is healing in the most natural sense. My own project of healing will not bear fruit for many years, but the track is being laid, slow and steady.

The American body shouts for us, tomorrow’s zealots of care, to disregard everything in front of our eyes and give aid instead of hate. Lady Liberty, silently buried within, waits for us to take up our chisels and set upon the hard work, one chip at a time.

Nate Berg is a member of the Class of 2027.