How Rage Against the Machine Rescued Me

When do late bloomers come of age? How old is too old to rage against the machine? Can middle age masquerade as a teenage dream?

These are the questions I found myself asking as I revisited the music of my youth.

The year: 1992.

The band: Rage Against the Machine.

The album: Rage Against the Machine.

The track listing:

1. “Bombtrack”
2. “Killing in the Name”
3. “Take the Power Back”
4. “Settle for Nothing”
5. “Bullet in the Head”
6. “Know Your Enemy”
7. “Wake Up”
8. “Fistful of Steel”
9. “Township Rebellion”
10. “Freedom”

 

What was it about this album that resonated?

At the tender age of 15, I had no idea.

Take track 2.

And now you do what they told ya, now you’re under control

And now you do what they told ya!

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me!

It was as if frontman Zack de la Rocha was speaking directly to me. Except for one thing—I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel controlled by anyone, minus the math teacher who gave too much homework. I had two loving parents and lived a standard life in a standard suburb of New Haven, Connecticut.

How about track 3?

Yeah, we gotta take the power back

Come on, come on!

We gotta take the power back

Hell yeah! I remember thinking. But what power? From whom?

Or track 5?

Just victims of the in-house drive-by

They say jump, you say how high

A bullet in ya head

Ya gotta bullet in ya f*uckin’ head!

Jumping meant trying to touch the basketball rim. And I had never handled a firearm (does a BB gun count?), nor did I have a particular interest in heading down that path.

Track 7?

I’ll give ya a dose

But it’ll never come close

To the rage built up inside of me

Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy

The reality is that I wasn’t raging against any machine.

To be honest, I could have built the machine myself, i.e. pad the resume for college and pave the way for medical school, a wife, two kids, two cars, and 3,500 square feet.

So what did all of this mean then?

Almost three decades later, I would find out.

 

Midlife

By this point in my life, I had moved a whopping six hours away, landing in another suburb, this one of Rochester, New York.

The machine was fine-tuned and well-oiled, bringing in six figures and resulting in manicured landscaping.

I was firing on all cylinders.

That is, until The Man descended. If you’re not in health care, that refers to the system—the one that gobbles up small practices, consolidating disparate entities into a dysfunctional whole, all the while funneling funds scraped off the back of medical labor to boardrooms at the top.

By signing on the dotted line, I went from small-business owner to laborer overnight. Soon, representatives from the boardroom began to show up. They generated no revenue themselves, but they knew who did—me.

And I needed to generate more of it. The mandate—see more patients, a euphemism for bill more.

How about quality of care? That shouldn’t get in the way of quantity.

How about quality of life? We’ll get some food trucks and give you a discount voucher.

What if I want to leave the system? There’s a noncompete clause.

Now you’re under control

And now you do what they told ya!

I traveled the halls of the hospital, doing my best to surround myself with doctors who loved their jobs. Or liked their jobs. Or even tolerated their jobs. In the last group, I found a few—they worked part-time.

How did this happen? we asked.

How did all the student loans, years of training, and time sacrificed result in…this?

Yeah, we gotta take the power back

Come on, come on!

We gotta take the power back

But we didn’t.

We didn’t know how.

We did, however, know how the system worked.

They say jump, you say how high

So we resorted to looking for a Plan B.

Why?

Because Plan B could save our lives—literally.

My brother, a doctor himself, lost his burned-out colleague to suicide. A self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A bullet in ya head

You gotta bullet in ya f*ckin head!

Thankfully, in my case, medicine never defined me. It might have defined me in the minds of others, but not my own.

I had dreamed of cutting back and starting a new adventure.

The system helped turn the dream into reality. Each productivity report made me gag. The billboards that feigned an interest in patient care were even worse. And the food trucks meant to appease—they didn’t work.

To the rage built up inside of me

Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy

So one day, I told the system my new schedule.

And as I made it through Rage Against the Machine thirty years later, I finally understood what I had been hearing all along.

Track 10

Freedom, yeah

Freedom, yeah right

Freedom, yeah!

 

All lyrics courtesy azlyrics.com