America is not feeling well. She suffers from a myriad of symptoms — fear, anger, depression, occasional nausea brought on by fear, anger and depression. Sometimes there are chills and shortness of breath, a tightness around the heart. Mornings are the worst. America wakes up dreading what might appear on the computer screen, or on TV. Did the president go on a twitter rant again? How out of control was he this time? What world leader has he insulted? Those pre-dawn hours, even on weekends, are when he seems to unravel the most. And then there is the later time slot when Sean Spicer informs the press and all of us what new executive orders Donald Trump has signed. Nothing seems immune to Mr. Trump’s need for demolition, even national monuments which have been protected for generations. Our already wounded planet may never survive this administration. At night, America lies awake frightened of the future. What will happen to us? What will happen to our children?

America’s pre-existing condition can best be diagnosed as stress. As any doctor can tell you, stress overloads the system, causes the body to go haywire in many different ways. It can cause heart attacks, strokes, immune deficiencies; stress can even lead to early death if not treated.

Sadly, America can’t get any help for this condition. Typically, in years past, we would look to the leaders of the country to comfort us, reassure us, calm our fears and embolden our confidence in the future. They were our hospital. Those at the top levels of government were there to take care of the country in times of crisis, and we turned to them with an assumption that they would do just that. But we are now in a continual state of crisis. We have an administration that drinks up drama and spits it out across the land; we have a president who can’t help but create crises on a weekly basis. A president whose closest aids are his completely unqualified family members and a vice-president who fawns so much over the man who outranks him, it makes our collective nausea worse. We have a cadre of wealthy white men who grin and pose for cameras after they rammed a bill through Congress that will abandon the poor, the ill, the elderly, women everywhere, and will reward the rich.

No one will insure America in her time of crisis. We stand alone in our misery, increasingly isolated by a puzzled world which is also weighed down by fears of what will come next from this administration. There is no hospital, no medical team that can heal our symptoms while the cause of those symptoms has power over us. We need a miracle. We need to reach deep into our collective soul and remember who America is, who America is supposed to be. We are supposed to be a leader in the world, not an embarrassment. We are supposed to be strong, not rude and bullying and shockingly ignorant. When illness strikes, miraculous healing can sometimes come from an upsurge of faith — faith in a power beyond conventional medicine, faith in the determination of the human spirit to not be broken or defeated. Miracles are the manifestation of a decision — the decision to believe that they are possible. In these health-challenged times, will we remember who we are, and where the moral high ground is, or will we be eroded by an administration that sees destructiveness as an emblem of power?

Frederick Douglass, who President Trump apparently thought was still around, said, “A battle lost or won is easily described, understood and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.”