“Responding to videos that suggested their son [V.A. nurse Alex Pretti, who was killed by federal immigration agents] was a ‘domestic terrorist,’ Pretti’s family said: ‘The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.’” — BBC
Veterans Affairs nurses are proud to announce their designation as the nation’s newest domestic terrorist group. We’ve achieved this great honor by working on the inside—and no one is more “inside” than those administering enemas to our former soldiers.
Our mission is to help protect health care for the warriors who served our great country by working toward a society in which safety and well-being are the norm. We realize that this might not sound like a typical terrorism agenda, but in our country these days, nobody takes groups seriously unless they’ve been labeled a domestic terrorist organization.
Our coalition members are all nurses, since someone dressed in scrubs and glittery Dansko clogs is more likely to be mistaken for Ms. Rachel than a domestic terrorist. We don’t do any actual demonstrations, since we’re constantly surveilled while working on federal property and always way behind on our actual nursing work due to chronic understaffing. But we nevertheless take pride in watching over the beating hearts of our nation, ready to act at a moment’s notice.
Don’t bother applying if you can’t pass an extensive, multistep criminal background check and drug test. Not only can our members not have any prior history of terrorist involvement of any sort, but even the smallest puff of a joint would immediately tank your application.
True, it wasn’t easy building an organization like ours with no experience or training in domestic terrorism. But as everyone knows, nurses are basically superhuman by nature and incredibly versatile, expertly gliding from performing chest compressions to holding a dying patient’s hand to building the best domestic terrorist organization in the nation.
Excellence in domestic terrorism necessitates self-sacrifice, and V.A. nurses excel in this regard. Our rigorous training program requires staying up all night, working twelve-hour shifts, and being on call on most holidays. Trainees must abandon their families in the name of duty and survive on broken graham crackers and child-sized off-brand ginger ale while dealing with angry, grieving family members at three in the morning.
Where do our powers come from? For starters, with nine million US veterans enrolled in V.A. health services, we are less than six degrees of separation from everyone’s secrets. From Big Joe’s hair transplant to Little Joe’s infidelity, we’ve listened patiently to it all—and frankly, we were dying inside.
And what’s more, we know how to organize. As every great domestic terrorist organization knows, our greatest strength lies in our sense of community and togetherness. We always have each other’s backs and our patients’, even when they’ve been on their call light continuously for the last six hours.
We recognized early on that, unlike some other designated domestic terrorist organizations, we don’t have much of a stomach for violence. After all, we took an oath to live “in purity.” So we came up with a new, top-secret playbook: love, compassion, and community.
Don’t tell anyone, but we are actually incapable of intentionally harming others. Patients might sexually harass us while ALSO punching us in the face, and even then, we will carefully avoid any possibility of bodily injury while applying any necessary restraints.
Our most successful domestic terrorist efforts depend on our capacity for de-escalation. We can talk down a six-foot-seven guy high on angel dust or a doctor in a fit of narcissistic rage and have them willfully taking Xanax in no time.
V.A. nurses have long been the unofficial “resistance” of the US Veterans Health Administration, fighting for our patients at every step. Now, united in our mission to heal our nation, V.A. nurses stand proudly as the only designated domestic terrorist group whose passion for ideological warfare is fueled by the heart of a nurse.
Just don’t come at us with a baby or a service dog—those make us weak in the knees.
