Who Owns Your Vet (10)? Lessons from the People’s House (#433)

 The White House stands with its East Wing demolished beside a veterinary hospital partially destroyed.

This is a shared metaphor for the erosion of dignity in both governance and medicine, and the hope of restoration through integrity.

I have been following the destruction of the White House East Wing with sadness and reflection.

Then it occurred to me.

Could this be a metaphor for what is happening in veterinary medicine?

The Meaning of the People’s House

There’s a certain way light falls on the White House in autumn. Pale, patient, and golden, like history pausing mid-sentence. It was never meant to be a palace. It was built to remind us that democracy is not grand, but grounded. That power can coexist with humility, and ceremony with care.

The East Wing once embodied that ideal. It was where compassion met responsibility.

Where condolence letters were written, holiday cards prepared, and the families of the fallen were greeted with a steady hand and the simple words:

We remember.

The space was not about politics, but about grace.

It was a living symbol of the nation’s heart.

Today, the East Wing lies in ruins.

The demolition of the East Wing to make room for a gilded ballroom is more than architectural vandalism. It is the physical manifestation of arrogance. The belief that beauty, meaning, and memory can be replaced with spectacle.

The People’s House, once a sanctuary of shared dignity, has been recast as a stage set for ego. What was once built for ceremony and continuity has been transformed into a monument to excess.

The destruction of the East Wing is not merely structural.

It is moral.

And yet, even in rubble, there is hope.

One can imagine the day when gardeners return to replant the rose bushes, when craftsmen lift their tools to rebuild not for glory, but for purpose. When a young staffer again carries condolence letters across polished floors, and a child presses her nose to the Colonnade glass, seeing her reflection in a house that belongs, quietly and enduringly, to her.

That will be the moment when restoration transcends construction. When rebuilding becomes remembering.

The East Wing and the Veterinary Profession

The decline of the White House’s East Wing is not unique.

It mirrors what is happening in veterinary medicine.

Veterinary practice, too, was once built upon ideals of trust, continuity, and care.

Each clinic was a kind of People’s House. A place where compassion outweighed convenience, and where every decision was guided by conscience, not by quarterly returns.

But just as the East Wing fell to vanity, the profession is now being eroded by corporate ambition.

The warm hum of local practice has been replaced by the sterile whirr of consolidation.

Independent clinics, once pillars of their communities, are now branded, standardized, and optimized for profit.

The bond between a veterinary practice and animal owner has become a transaction, measured in metrics and margins.

What was once a vocation is now an investment strategy.

What was once a covenant is now a contract.

This is the same disease that toppled the East Wing.

The belief that all things, even the sacred, can be monetized.

That heritage, empathy, and service can be bought, packaged, and sold.

Rick’s Commentary

As with the People’s House, there remains hope.

In small clinics where the lights still burn after hours, in handwritten sympathy cards still slipped into envelopes, in young veterinarians who enter the field for love, not leverage.

Our restoration will not be measured in buildings or branding, but in conscience.

The profession will be rebuilt, one act of compassion at a time, by those who remember that care is not a commodity, and that the truest architecture of medicine lies in trust.

When the rubble clears, both in Washington and in our profession, may the light fall once again with quiet dignity, reminding us that beauty, in any house, is not what glitters, but what endures.

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