The thought behind The Leak in Our Hearts: Reconstruction

In times as now, when we are faced with a deadly disease, awareness to a very important and needed component to society has to be made. Our healthcare force. Many nations, such as ours, struggle with the capacity we need in order to have a healthy workforce, and the number of healthcare workers we currently have. We need more people to fill out the positions of doctors and nurses in order to provide a healthy nation. A healthy nation will ensure that the workforce won’t crumble underneath the pressure of illness, and the right capacity of healthcare workers will ensure that those sick in the workforce are being treated fast and efficiently. The poem, The Leak in Our Hearts: Reconstruction, brings awareness to how understaffed we really are, and why we are as understaffed as we are. Debt. 

With the help of the poem in a magazine, I am reaching people across the whole country. The poem is there to be emphasized on and contains elements of everyday life that many if not all can relate to, the daily interaction with other people.

For this composition, I, the author Sela Schneidinger, decided to develop a poem spreading awareness of how we are understaffed in the healthcare field. I believed this to be better than writing a poem about healthcare because the low number in healthcare providers is one of the root problems for not being able to generate a single-payer universal healthcare system in the United States of America. By spreading the awareness of this serious problem, I am thinking about the audience, and how the audience can most likely relate to this poem. I decided to address the audience with the purpose of making it relatable and was able to achieve that by writing how people react to people coughing and sneezing on the trains in life today. Scared and terrified, staring and glaring at each other, especially in the days of COVID-19. With this excerpt, I, the author, demonstrate understanding for how people are reacting and create the stance that “You are not the only one”. Portraying this unity between author and audience was strengthened by using language that all, old and young, can understand. The overall tone was neither condescending nor complimentary, it was rather pleading and hopeful for a change. 

Publishing the poem in the New York Times would let people across the nation be able to have access to this composition. In addition to that many students and teachers read the times and by spreading awareness to the young and the educators of this nation, people should be more inclined to fill in spots that are in need of being filled. However, if they aren’t they will be aware of all the changed that should be set in place to encourage more people to join the healthcare field. The poem talks about this ‘leak’ in healthcare providers being caused by the high costs of its overall education and the debt being collected from doing so. 

The rhetorical situation for this poem was prompted to me by the want to show people how expensive and debt costing going into the healthcare, and what blocking this ‘leak’ and asking the ‘you up there’, also known as the government, for help in order to block this leak. The New York Times was one of the best ways to show this problem and combined with the light-hearted way a poem can affect a reader and make them think, I believed this was the best way to convey the real problem we are having in our healthcare field, and make the reader think without feeding them with long SAT words. The awareness had to be spread to all in a manner that people should have space to think and build their own thought. 

Publishing a composition to spread awareness to an issue that all citizens of race, colour, and ethnicity share should not be constricted to any audience. It should be there for all. Therefore, combining a poem that can relate to all who interact with other, shows a higher level of understanding from the author to the reader, and publishing this poem that so many can relate within a magazine that so many people have access to. In order to make a real change in all thing healthcare-related I know that we first have to change the number of workers we have in the health field, therefore, this poem is there to emphasises this need and what is haltering this need.

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