New York City is freezing right now. I’m talking about the kind of cold that hurts your face. The kind of cold that makes your fingers feel like they might snap off if you touch a door handle. It is miserable out there. But you know who is standing out in it? Nurses. Thousands of them. They are walking in circles on the sidewalk, holding signs, yelling until their voices are gone. They aren't doing this because they like the fresh air. They are doing it because the system is broken, and nobody with any real power actually cares.

Let’s look at the facts. We have about 15,000 nurses from big hospital systems on strike. They walked out. They said, "Enough." They want more staff. They want safer hospitals. They want better health benefits. Think about that for a second. The people who fix your broken leg and check your heart rate have to fight for their own healthcare. That is the level of stupidity we are dealing with here. It is a joke. A bad, unfunny joke.

The hospitals say they can't afford it. They cry poor. They say times are tough. But then you look at the guys running the show. The CEOs. The suits. These guys are taking home giant pay packages. Millions of dollars. For what? Do they change bedpans? No. Do they deal with screaming patients in the ER at 3:00 AM? No. They sit in offices with nice leather chairs and decide how many nurses they can fire to save a nickel. They treat a hospital like a burger joint. They want to sell as many burgers—I mean, treat as many patients—as possible, with the absolute minimum number of staff. It’s a factory line. And if the factory line breaks, they just blame the workers.

So, the nurses are outside. It is sub-zero weather. It is dangerous cold. And who shows up? The politicians. Of course they do. They smell a camera crew like a shark smells blood in the water. Senator Bernie Sanders showed up. The Mayor showed up. Other local politicians like Zohran Mamdani showed up. They all put on their serious faces. They grabbed the microphones. They yelled about justice. They yelled about corporate greed.

Here is the thing that drives me crazy. These politicians love a strike. They love it. It gives them a stage. It makes them look like heroes of the working class. Bernie Sanders has been yelling the same speech since the invention of the radio. Has it fixed anything? No. The hospitals are still understaffed. The CEOs are still rich. But Bernie gets his photo taken, and everyone claps. Then, when the speech is over, the politicians get into their warm cars with heated seats. They go to lunch. They go back to their warm offices.

The nurses? They stay on the sidewalk. They stay in the cold. Because for them, this isn't a photo op. It is their life. They aren't trying to get votes. They are trying to get enough people on a shift so that patients don't die. That is the difference. One group is fighting for survival. The other group is fighting for attention.

This is how the whole country works now. The people who do the actual work—the hard, messy, necessary work—get treated like dirt. They get squeezed until they pop. And the people at the top? The managers, the owners, the political leaders? They just play games. They use the workers as props in their little theater show. The Right says unions are bad and lazy. The Left says they love unions, but only when it helps them win an election. Neither side actually fixes the problem.

The problem is greed. Pure and simple. The hospital systems have turned into money machines. They don't care about health. If they cared about health, they wouldn't force the people who save lives to stand in freezing temperatures just to get a fair contract. They would pay them. They would hire more of them. It isn't complicated math. A fifth grader could figure this out. But a fifth grader doesn't have a multi-million dollar bonus depending on cutting costs.

So, the strike goes on. The second week. It’s colder than ever. The nurses are tough. You have to be tough to be a nurse in this city. You see things that would make a banker cry. But even tough people have a breaking point. They are tired. They are cold. And they are watching the people in charge—both the hospital bosses and the politicians—play with their lives like it’s a board game.

Don't expect this to get better soon. The suits will hold out as long as they can. They want to break the nurses. They want them to give up and come back to work for peanuts. And the politicians will move on to the next tragedy or the next scandal as soon as the cameras leave. That is the American way. We clap for the heroes, and then we leave them out in the snow to freeze.