“People Are Angrier. Whatever Happened to Peace and Love?”
I was watching The Pitt the other night, a gritty hospital drama that doesn’t shy away from hard truths. In one scene, after a nurse is assaulted by a patient, a staff member says:
“The world's changed. People are angrier. Tempers are shorter. And we're still just trying to help.”
Later in the episode, during a mass casualty event at a music festival, a patient, wounded and overwhelmed, looks around and says:
“Whatever happened to peace and love?”
Those two lines, shook me. Because they don’t feel like fiction. They feel like right now.
You can sense it almost everywhere you go. The tension. The frustration. The sense that people are just done. It shows up in waiting rooms and grocery store lines, school board meetings and social media comment sections. And yes, it shows up in the hallways of our clinics and hospitals, too.
If you work in healthcare, you’ve lived this shift. You’ve felt the mood change. The tone. The impatience. Sometimes, even the danger. It’s heavy. And it’s not just happening in healthcare. It’s happening to us all.
We’ve walked through a pandemic. We’ve lived with division. We’ve watched trust erode. And somewhere along the way, we forgot how to see each other clearly. How to listen. How to slow down long enough to give grace.
But I’m an optimist. I don’t believe this is the end of our story. I believe it’s the middle. The part where we decide who we’re going to become from here.
When that patient asked, “Whatever happened to peace and love?”, they weren’t just mourning the past. They were asking something of us.
Because peace and love are not gone. They’ve just been drowned out. And it’s up to us to bring them back.
Not with grand gestures, but with everyday choices:
- Choosing kindness when it would be easier to shut down.
- Offering patience instead of blame.
- Remembering that everyone is carrying something we cannot see.
We don’t need more division. We need people willing to stand in the middle and hold space for something better.
I’m not naïve about how hard things have become. But I am clear on this: we will not build a better future through fear or contempt. We will build it through compassion, courage, and community.
That’s the kind of leadership I believe in. That’s the kind of country I still believe in. One where people show up, lift each other up, and reach for something higher.
So the next time you feel the anger, the pressure, the heat, pause. Take a breath. And ask what that patient asked:
Whatever happened to peace and love?
Then choose to be the answer.
— Mike Baker
Author of The Optimist’s Way This is exactly the kind of message I wrote The Optimist’s Way to explore, what it means to lead with hope, even when the world feels heavy. If that speaks to you, I’d be honored if you gave the book a read.
Pick up your copy of the book today: https://a.co/d/0Sxatfv
Here's a song that connects with this story -
https://on.soundcloud.com/etjiLs1zHXWDJVpz9
