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Keep this heroic global health movement!

As a community, I write on behalf of us all. We don’t need any one story, any singular experience as the experience that personifies what global health means for all of us. Not when all experiences matter.

In the words of Toni Morrison, what we need now is a heroic global health movement, one assertive, clear, direct, even confrontational and bold about what global health means. This is the mission. This is the risk. Something we must choose.

About 1 million foreign travelers enter the US everyday. One million. They come bringing their roots, bringing their goods, bringing their chorus, bringing their gifts. We in turn, welcome them in with our gifts, welcome them singing our songs, welcome them in with their goods, welcome them in learning their roots. That exchange is at the heart of global health. An exchange with no borders. You don’t have to leave the US to understand why this field matters. Simply go to your local airport and see for yourself.

If ever there was the need to sound a clarion call for global health, to sound a call for change in its status, to sound a call for the low esteem in which the field is held, to remind anyone about the primacy of health first and across borders, and why we all need each other, then that time would be now.

By ourselves as single trees, we are nothing. But as a forest of trees, a collective of units, we can bring change and change is needed now more than ever in careful ways.

This past week, kept me in a fever of sorts for global health. A fever that left a portion of my head in pain at the weight of the change the latest notice from the NIH will bring. I was sitting in my office on Tuesday when I got wind this change was coming. It was as if the air stood still for a moment. I also held my breath for a moment and reminded myself to breath in and out, in and out. Rain was falling outside my window. The skies were grey and consumed by thunder and lighting that mirrored the mood.

So I sat back in my office that day and cried. I simply let the tears flow. We are truly in a fever. A deeply disturbed fever about the life of our nations community of global health researchers. The picture of security, of health being restricted with one’s borders alone is a false picture. We cannot restore what we never had. Health in one border has never been for that border alone. The bigger the claim of making one border healthy again, the more we lie about ourselves and our borders. Every single day over 1 million international travelers are welcomed into our borders. One million.

To think then that a notice to stop learning, a notice to stop listening, a notice to stop even loving is the answer is as false as the picture we paint of what it means to be great. Such a composition has nothing to do with health. Plus this kind of thinking has other forms we mistake as action: that being great alone is success.

Meanwhile being great is active. Being great is inventive. Being great is adaptive. Being great does not faint at difference. Being great requires us to bear witness calmly at all the ways we are exceptional and by God, we are.

One million people pour into our borders every single day. Service to others, as Muhammad Ali would say, is the rent we pay for our space in heaven. Our is a business to ourselves and others. So I’m tired of speeches that think ours isn’t a porous borders. I’m tired of actions that assume that it’s only global when you leave your borders. I’m tired of stooping low to bring this essential truth to light. I’m tired of the waste we will all bear of ineffective notices that cost, harm, and outright ignores the one million people that come into our borders every single day.

So this is for anyone ready for a heroic global health movement, one where we refuse to be the victim, one where we have lived with this violence for too long. Something is very wrong when we think global is out there. This is life and death and global health is at your doorstep.

Source: Keep this heroic global health movement!

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