A couple of days ago, I posted something about authoritarianism being our central foe, even more than the individual personalities who so greatly enjoy obstructing legislation for the sheer fun of it. Or… just to be able to score a few short-term political points, receive some lobbyists’ gravy, or consolidate their power even more than they have already, with additional corporate help.

In the comments, I attributed my perspective to having had some really good body work in recent years (mostly acupuncture). That statement may seem like a non-sequitur, but it isn’t. A few years ago, while still in what turned out to be the middle of an ongoing health issue, I had an epiphany: that being or becoming organized must always start with the body. It seems like such an obvious statement, but consider how many of us skip meals, get too little sleep, and don’t have a regular schedule of shopping for food or doing our laundry. (As a child who grew up, like a nomad, in a military family, this simple bit of wisdom was far from obvious to me, and I suspect the same may be true for others who live on the lower rungs of the SES ladder, simply because they cannot always meet those basic needs.)

And then there’s our health care routine, if we have one: yearly check-ups, semi-annual dental visits, mammograms, and so on. You can see where I’m going here… If we take care of our bodies as we know we should, other things in our lives may not exactly fall into place, but they are not nearly the challenges they become when we are under- or badly-nourished, sleep-deprived, running around with exhausted adrenal glands, or have difficulty with the simple digestion of food. (That seems to be a pretty common problem these days.)

I cannot claim to have solved all of my own issues to my own satisfaction, but I’m getting close. For the first time in my life, I am of a more or less normal weight, after being underweight most of my life. (Being underweight is not nearly as desirable as it looks, given one’s lack of stamina and energy.) And I am no longer severely anemic. My primary physician is pleased with my progress and told me that I should be proud of where I am, given that I’ve mostly figured things out for myself. With his support. Without a bunch of drugs. Having a significant amount of dental work done in a short period of time last year led to what I believe may have been the final crisis, and has actually led to greatly improved health, once I found some foods that finally solved a few digestive issues.

So my essential question is: How can it be possible for us– as a country– to achieve anything like our ancestors achieved in the past, if we don’t first take care of our total health, i.e., the health of all of us, and not just a select few whose composition changes with the winds and whims of business and unemployment cycles?

Put simply, we cannot.

Granted, our ancestors had a few advantages that might have meant they could get by with fewer doctors visits: fewer environmental toxins, no high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats. Their fruits and vegetables were raised closer to home, picked when ripe, and transported many fewer miles. Beef, pork and poultry in those days were fed without hormones or antibiotics and allowed to graze, so they could consume greater quantities of green foods containing those essential fatty acids. In fact, their soil, in which they grew the food they ate was healthier than our soil is now. Agribusiness has been no friend to our health or to the planet’s.

Nor were there such expectations for multi-tasking and always being "on" as we have now. In fact, in the past, increases in productivity were, as a rule, shared with workers. However, that "sharing" has not happened for many decades. Instead, just as profits and income have moved up the SES scale, so have access to health care, leisure, and most of the other (now) creature comforts that we once took for granted.

The bottom line is that our bodies (not just the bodies of those who enlist in the military) have finally become simple fodder for capitalists who have decided that they really don’t have to share either their profits or the increases in our productivity with us.

An actual revolution in health care will finally begin only when we take responsibility for our own health to the very best of our ability, rather than looking to such "authoritative" figures as doctors and insurance providers to do it for us. And if we have a few extra minutes, dollars, or other resources, perhaps we can help the process along by helping someone else who has fewer of them. Such actions may not change or win the minds and hearts of any of our capitalist elites, but they could create a synergistic energy that will require less dependence upon the existing bureaucrats employed by insurance providers and BigPharma. It’s not as if the current medical system really knows what to do about chronic conditions anyway… those are conditions that we are better able to take care of for ourselves, if we really attend to them, and if we share what we know and learn with others. And if that means fewer profits for those same capitalist elites, well… so be it.

Let them make all of their profits on those more profound diseases and conditions that can only be treated by other means… and finally be seen as the vultures they really are.

The truth is that I really dislike making utilitarian arguments, when an argument from higher principles should be enough to satisfy anyone with a conscience, but sometimes a utilitarian argument is the only type that those so-called conservatives are able to understand. Their simpler, black-and-white thinking, hive-mind would prefer to organize us all via the prison system. So, to them, we must communicate that our (native) work force is hobbled– not only because so many of us are imprisoned– but also because of an urgent lack of access to excellent health care, and that if they really wish to reap even greater profits, they must re-think their opposition to universal health care (something we may remind them that Nixon actually favored).

The grand old party that used to think it had a monopoly on family values and responsibility has resorted to the lowest common denominator as a motivating factor: Fear. Unfortunately, our Democratic leadership seems to be going along, in their misguided attempt to get along. Bipartisanship is everything, after all. No matter the cost.

Both parties, finally, have discarded the now quaint notion of health as a primary good upon which all else depends. So, that quaint notion is now ripe for the taking.