To the Editor:

All of us who rely upon the local news as a monitor on morality have heard and borne witness to the fault lines in our great nation. Core values, common decency, and social mores have been set spinning. The causes — multitudinous and complex — demonstrate divisions not seen since the Civil War. Citizens are out of sync with one another and there is a gross lack of social consensus. The nation and communities are undergoing trial if not tribulation.

A while before the sexual harassment allegation epidemic began becoming daily news, I, a male, experienced sexual harassment by a female employee at a regional hospital in a small town in Western North Carolina. What was yelled at me and actions following, without any provocation, constituted assault, premeditated discrimination, infliction of intentional pain and suffering, and sexual harassment by this hospital’s employee on a patient. 

At the top of her lungs, in a waiting room, full of patients, she screamed at me, “you are a male sexist chauvinist pig.” Within one minute, hospital security was compelling me to depart. The party was deaf to my physical suffering and assumed I was responsible as patient where the power lay with the employee.

Now these were fighting words, not only heard in bars but in a hospital and to a patient. Odds are one in 50 million. But at a small subsidiary hospital of a nationally top-ranked health system, this was unbelievable. 

Upon review by hospital CEO and subsidiary ethics unit, after initial misrepresentation, it was determined that this employee called me, before a host of waiting patients, a “male sexist chauvinist pig.” Required to immediately depart, I left physically suffering, slandered, humiliated and in a state of shock and profound disheartenment. 

Needless to say, my attempts to obtain an apology were ignored by the leadership of the hospital 

My purpose to the public is not to grieve before it, but cite an example of how terribly torn we are as a society, as a culture, as a people, and as a country. Fragmented, fractured, and in chaos, I hope and pray that we can mend our way before the problems in motion overwhelm us.

Paul Blank

Franklin