Albany update

Just marched down Central Avenue in Albany with a mixed race crowd chanting for a more just and peaceful policing system. We started in Arbor Hill, the broke and black part of Albany where so many of our patients live. For a start, I felt safe in a neighborhood where I have been told never to feel safe. (That's been an effort of a local family doctor here, to get people out in the neighborhood and feeling safe.) People came out of their apartments to cheer, men joined in as we passed, cars stopped and honked in support. Just as I feel empowered by my white coat to join in where I might have been shy in the past, the rally seemed to empower this neighborhood; or perhaps the neighborhood, empowered, created the rally. I passed one patient's street and then another. I was so moved by the crowd chanting, marching with both hands raised, that for several blocks I was silent. But I am not a tourist: my grandmother drove black families to the polls to vote for JFK in 1960. As medical students, we work with people and care for patients whose communities face injustices and challenges that many of us don't face personally. I want to be able to look my patients in the eye and let them know that I know and I care about what's going on outside of the hospital. To demonstrate that people in a position of authority want change too. Last winter I attended my first rally ever, marching down Michigan Avenue in Chicago with Students for a National Health Plan, feeling awkward and ambivalent. Yet trying something once makes it so much easier to try it again, sets off a chain reaction.