“Wake up, everybody
No more sleepin’ in bed
No more backward thinkin’
Time for thinkin’ ahead…”
The line slips in before the train does.
It moves through someone’s headphones as the doors of a Green Line train slide open at Anacostia Metro Station. Morning rush, but not the polished kind that makes it into postcards. This is real movement—people balancing coffee cups, kids, and night shifts that run long into mornings that can’t start late.
Same city. Same season, leaning from spring into summer.
Across Washington, DC, another morning is already unfolding at Dupont Circle—laptops opening beside café windows, calendars already filling the day before it begins, takeaway coffee already halfway gone before 9 a.m.
Same song playing in the background.
“The world won’t get no better
If we just let it be…”
The song—Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.
More than fifty years later, it still moves through mornings like this—not as background music, but as something that follows people into trains, streets, and workdays already in motion.
Health equity shows up in the distance between mornings—in how differently those mornings are lived, depending on time, work, and access. It shows up in our healthcare system on who can take time off to sit in a waiting room—and who has to calculate what missing hours will cost.
Access to care is never only about distance. Long before the clinical encounter, it is shaped by insurance, eligibility, and whether work allows someone to keep coverage at all.
Disparities shaped by race, income, and geography still determine who gets time to recover and who has to keep moving.
Step into a medical facility, and you can hear those negotiations happening in real time—phones ringing behind the front desk, intake forms sliding across counters, conversations measured against the clock.
How long will this take?
Can I come back if I lose hours today?
Is this serious—or can it wait?
Not because people don’t care about their health, but because care is shaped by structures that determine time, access, and obligation long before anyone enters the room.
That choice does not stay in the health facility. It follows people back into work schedules that don’t bend, buses that don’t always align with appointments, and days that have to be calculated in hours instead of recovery.
Across the city, care moves through a network of providers and institutions, including community health centers such as Unity Health Care and Community of Hope, alongside managed care organizations like AmeriHealth Caritas DC; all working within the same pressures of time, access, and demand—especially for those most in need.
Every day, calls are returned between appointments, messages left and picked up in fragments of time that rarely line up cleanly. A referral moves from one desk to another, then another, as schedules shift and reopen around it. Someone is told to come back next week; someone else is squeezed in before the day fills; someone else is called after hours when the rest of the building has already moved on.
In waiting rooms, outreach calls, food distributions, prenatal visits, and follow-up conversations that stretch beyond the appointment itself, that work continues quietly. Staff and care teams move with it—adjusting plans, tracking down paperwork that was never designed to be simple, trying to keep people connected across visits, across agencies, across the gaps between one moment of care and the next.
Families move through bureaucracies that rarely align cleanly with care.
And still, the same refrain echoes beneath it all
“The world won’t get no better
We gotta change it…”
Not as just a message, but as an atmosphere moving through ordinary routines that never fully separate from pressure.
Wake Up Everybody is not a slogan. Not nostalgia. But recognition that the city is already waking—through care, through endurance, and through the daily work of people and organizations trying to hold together what is under strain.
And still, endurance is too often treated as a substitute for change.
But surviving a system should never be the only goal.
Changing it is.
About the Authors
Brian Floyd, is an Assistant Dean in the School of Health and a faculty member at the Capital Applied Learning Lab at Georgetown University. Roberto Terrell Jr., is a research assistant and psychology and economics major in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University.
Together, they form Rhythms, Verses & Reflections, an intergenerational collaboration using verse, narrative, and memory to illuminate life, culture, and community care. Their work centers storytelling as a bridge across generations, preserving and amplifying voices often left unheard.
