To: RFK Jr.
To the Right Honourable Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
Secretary of Health and Human Services,
District of Columbia, by way of the Styx.
Sir,
With a heart bewildered by both awe and dismay, I take up my pen—a trembling reed upon the septic tide of our shared American tragedy—to address your recent Dionysian wade into the yeasty waters of Rock Creek. What Promethean confidence-or more rightly, what Oedipal blindness—possessed you to immerse yourself and, God preserve them, your progeny, in that fetid broth which the National Park Service, no less than a modern Sibyl, had marked “unfit for man or beast”?
Have you mistaken the bubbling effluence of our failing infrastructure for the Castalian spring? Or do you, in some Rousseauian madness, believe the best baptism for your grandchildren lies not in clean living nor purified science, but in a sewer blessed by ancestral delusion?
Ye gods of reason! Was not our age already confounded by microbes unleashed, by water fouled, by air thick with the flatulence of negligence? And now you, the anointed steward of the nation’s health, cavort like Pan amid the reeds, trailing guileless children behind you into waters blooming with E. coli and democratic absurdity.
Had Nero fiddled while Rome burned, you, sir, would have belly-flopped into the Tiber and declared it tonic.
The body politic, already diseased, finds no cure in this murky spectacle—only a deeper infection of trust, a rash of ridicule spreading across our common skin.
We look to our guardians not for martyrdom by bacteria, but for policy, protection, and potable clarity.
There are public acts that cleanse the soul. This was not among them.
Remove, sir, your laurels of lunacy, and recall your post, lest the gods mistake your folly for leadership.
With ironic health,
An Undisinfected Citizen
—written with vinegar and fainting patience
