Around 4:50 p.m. on Thursday, my phone began lighting up. I was receiving texts from almost everyone I knew — old friends from my Los Angeles days to new friends in D.C., country bumpkins to city dwellers — all echoing the same Hallelujah at Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Many of those texts were accompanied by the fire and bicep muscle emojis. 

While many are melting down over the pick, criticizing Kennedy for being nothing more than a “vaccine denier,” those of us who have been supporting him since the “Make America Healthy Again” movement knew he was onto something. Through our own health experiences, we understood that America doesn’t have a health care system, it has a sick care system — one that, unfortunately, people have become used to. But as Jiddu Krishnamurti, a renowned Indian philosopher and speaker, once said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” 

It is now an anomaly not to have at least one, if not several, orange tubes with child-protective white caps on them in the medicine cabinet. And it’s difficult to help a society addicted to meds think clearly about their health.

I’ll never forget one day a couple of years ago when a classmate from grad school inadvertently announced she was on antidepressants. Many of us looked at her, a little stunned at the admission. “Wait, isn’t everyone on SSRIs???” she responded.

For decades now, illness and disease have been normalized. Frequent doctor visits, endless side effects from medications requiring more medication, scores of tests and blood draws — all in a day’s work for the average American. Diagnosing illness and treating symptoms has become a big business. 

Cancer and drug research budgets, huge hospital systems, and behemoth insurance conglomerates all operate to the tune of trillions of dollars that we ultimately pay for. The United States has the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, yet by most metrics, we are the most unhealthy wealthy nation in the world. 

Almost 3 in 4 American adults is overweight or obese, with no state having an adult obesity rate below 20 percent. According to the CDC, 38.4 million people in the United States have diabetes (nearly 12 percent), 8.7 million are undiagnosed, and 97.6 million have pre-diabetes. Early-onset cancer diagnoses are up 79 percent over the last three decades.

It baffles me that people find these statistics less shocking than the appointment of Kennedy, a man who has the chops to do something about the problem. Some of us know what RFK Jr. knows: Disease, addiction, and depression, while typical, aren’t right. The human body is not designed to be in a perpetual state of disease. It is meant to heal itself and thrive, given the proper conditions.

We listen to our bodies when our doctors won’t listen to us, or we stay out of doctors’ offices altogether, preferring to find alternative healing modalities that insurance won’t cover. Often, we spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, knowing we’ll save money in the long run by not being ensnared in the biomedical-pharmaceutical complex and insurance scams. 

We demanded more information about a rushed mRNA shot and refused to be injected with it when no one would offer it. Many of us get made fun of for our coffee enemas, castor oil packs, insistence on cooking our own food, declining excessive alcohol, and collection of herbs and essential oils. Even our exercise and fitness routines have been demonized and billed as right-wing extremism. But we don’t care because we know there is a better way than what many of us have been duped into believing for too long.

Americans got used to three-letter agencies telling us what was good for us, assuming they knew better than we did. We got used to following bad food advice from the FDA (avoid animal fat), bad advice on disease from the CDC (high cholesterol causes heart attacks), and bad advice on treatment (statins for everyone!) — all based on bad science (brought to you by the NIH) that was bought and paid for by those who turn a generous profit by keeping Americans sick. 

As Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation said in a press release upon Kennedy’s nomination, “Americans are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Some say Kennedy will actually do more harm than good. However, like most of the perils our country faces right now, it can’t get much worse. 

Ultimately, when it comes to our health, it’s up to us to take power out of the hands of the bureaucracy and return it to its proper place: back to our land and our families. Trump and Kennedy will help us do that if we are willing to give them a shot to make health, not sickness, the new norm.