The Big Covid Picture
The Whole
“health” (n)
- from Old English (c. 5th - 15th c AD) hælþ: "wholeness, a being whole, sound or well"
- from Proto-Germanic (c. 5th c BC -5th c AD) hailitho: "whole, uninjured, of good omen."
- from Old Norse (c. 7th - 15th c AD) helge:"holy, sacred."
- in Middle English (c. 11th - 15th c AD): "prosperity, happiness, welfare; preservation, safety."
I have been wondering at the ironies everywhere on display with Covid 19. What linguists have discovered about the roots of the word “health” crystalizes those ironies for me.
In the interest of health we’ve thrown the prospects of prosperity and happiness for most people under a bus. Poverty, rampant food insecurity, financial stress, widespread emotional devastation and loneliness, fear, who-knows-what consequences for developing children, and stress-induced non-Covid illnesses are considered an unavoidable price to pay in the name of health. The unknown virus, our “health” experts told us from the outset, portended the bad omen of a “new normal” that involved distancing and isolation from one another. This was purported to make sense because “health” demanded it, and most quickly accepted this as beyond question. Sacred or whole? These, in alignment with long standing cultural habits, have also been thrown under the bus representing “health.” When there’s a new virus stalking like a tiger on the prowl, there’s nothing else to be done. Right?
“Right” is the answer of fear, desperation, cynicism. However, through the ages preceding ours, humankind—as the great theoretical physicist David Bohm observed--seemed to have intuitively gravitated toward the concepts for health that etymological research has uncovered—the ones I list up top. Humans did this in spite of seldom experiencing the forms of health they conceptualized and massaged into their languages. Through endless cycles of war, barbarism, rapacity, enslavement of the other, struggles with plagues of various kinds, famine; in spite of horrific concepts of a damning deity enshrined in menacing religions--humankind somehow cleaved to these concepts of what it means to have health.
Science has made a lot of progress in the five or six centuries since these meanings for health were more broadly in circulation. We also typically take ourselves to have made a lot of moral progress in the interim: alongside great strides in science, we like to see ourselves as more moderate, more insightful, more deliberative, more humane, less barbaric. How ironic, then, that that inborn concept of what it is to have health, one that persisted through the millennia in spite of everything, is being trampled in the name of health! Don’t our chosen solutions for the current novel virus, with all their collateral damage, spell out this irony loud and clear?
How ironic, then, that that inborn concept of what it is to have health, one that persisted through the millennia in spite of everything, is being trampled in the name of health!
We could take this sitting down. In fact, that’s what many are doing. With a shift in perspective, though, we could look at Covid and all of our activities surrounding it as a symptom of something much more systemic. (Come live dangerously with me, just for a moment while no one is watching!) Where there’s a symptom, you can look for an underlying cause so that the health you create goes beyond symptom control. With an assumption of health as wholeness, you would attempt to influence every aspect and every part that creates the symptom until gratitude sealed in a heightened state of understanding, a new level of contentment, happiness, safety, wholeness: a “breathing easier” that went beyond the physical. Wouldn’t it be nice if things worked this way?
“Disease” (n)
from Old French (8th c to 14th c) desaise: "lack, want; discomfort, distress; trouble, misfortune; disease, sickness." From des- "without, away" + aise "ease"
According to my own particular diagnostic orientation, one underlying dis-ease Covid mirrors for us is that our concept of health has lost any moral basis worth its salt. It is morally (though not financially!) bankrupt.
I know: “morality” has an ugly history bound up with people doing horrible things in the name of religion. Many of us, disturbed by this troubling history of morality, seek the solace of escape into the purity of science and its views on health, however troubling those may end up being. However, we can’t seem to help being highly moralistic, in some form, in spite of ourselves. In this age of Covid I note prevailing morality patterns like “gotta support my particular team by aligning myself with it in my every thought and action” or “everyone who doesn’t get the called-for jabs is a selfish jerk,” or “all people of the other political party are idiots, and above all I don’t want to be an idiot, so I will follow Covid norms that oppose theirs.” These moral patterns are rooted in fear, guilt, intimidation, tribalism, and judgment, and they feel normal because of the many ways culture reinforces them.
However, I note that those moralities are fundamentally different from a health care morality based on the definitions up top. According to those we might base our virus-containment efforts on the idea that the human body is sacred, part and parcel of a search for meaning of which physicality is only one aspect. With these as the foundational ideas for creating healings from illnesses and plagues (as various more emotionally healthy societies have done): then we are working with a morality rooted in wonder, awe, the drive to connect, discover, and evolve.
Which form of faith, and morality, would you choose, if you truly thought you had a choice? What would you change, as you go through your life, to support your choice?
Imagine if we could have approached the novel virus guided by the ancestral definitions of “health.” If unhappy, emotionally and financially impoverished people were considered sick by definition, public health would surely be stood on its head. It is also worth asking if prosperous, happy, physically healthy people who are in touch with their feelings are ever willing to discount the suffering of others as just a price to be paid, as in “gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet.” (Yeesh, isn’t that what we’ve said with the virus, if not with words?) I doubt it. From the perspective that health involves a relationship between emotional and physical feelings, it would not be possible to tolerate collateral damage such as we have witnessed throughout the pandemic. It would not be possible to view the emotional sufferings of others as just a few eggs needing to be broken.
Personally, I find it impossible not to hold the concepts of health reflected in definitions of old. My very humanity insists on it. The part of me that knows that health includes but extends far beyond the physical is greatly repelled by the thought patterns now in evidence. It refuses to worship an expert class that slaps band-aids on the flesh wound of Covid while pretending feelings and emotions are irrelevant. It understands that the current Covid picture many of us expend a lot of life energy to maintain (and isn’t it all of our energies that keep this bad picture the way it is?), mirrors beliefs that were hanging around long before this particular virus showed up.
Culture creates perceptual grooves so deep there can be no way to escape them without someone expending a lot of energy. We powerfully hold beliefs that the left-brain creations of an expert class are pure and sacred, untainted by emotional inputs. Those beliefs are part of a broad picture, a picture that is in violation of health because it denigrates us as beings that must sense, feel, have a moral compass in order to feel healthy and whole. But many are checking in with our senses, our feelings, as a matter of individual choice, in spite of much pressure against it. In the Covid Hologram I throw my energy behind the pursuit of ever-greater wholeness.
Our cultural habits and artifacts, the art we value or don’t value, our technologies, our financial values, our educational norms--all reinforce the patterns of thought that create our unworkable picture of health. For a deeper healing to be possible—and not just from Covid itself—we have to be willing to look at those, too.
Some say Covid will always be with us as a series of evolving strains. What if, actually, Covid will continue to bother us until we as individuals address the beliefs we hold that keep it animated, that keep us locked in understandings that preclude real solutions? What if, just maybe, Covid is a gift, an encouragement to change course, to evolve in our ability to value and answer to our deepest feelings? I would like to expend energy to extract the most from the Covid gift, and I hope you will join me.
The Reflection of the Whole
I know a lot of kids like Ben Ballman, whose daily routine is described in a 23 August New York Times article “Teens Are Advocating for Mental Health Days Off School.” The Times writes:
Before the pandemic shut everything down, his day started at 6:30 a.m., when he woke up to get ready for school. Next came several Advanced Placement courses; then either soccer practice or his job at a plant nursery; studying for the SAT; and various extracurricular activities. He often didn’t start his homework until 11 p.m., and finally went to bed three hours later. Every day it was the same grueling schedule.
Ben reported, “It’s not even that I was going above and beyond, it was, ‘This is the bare minimum.’ It’s like a pressure cooker that’s locked down. There’s nowhere to escape. Eventually you just kind of burst at some point, or, hopefully, you can get through it.”
How horrible, our children in a kind of pressure cooker from which there is no escape. And that’s not just a few tiger-parented kids here and there. Alongside all of this overworking of children, the article documents a gradual uptick over the past decade in indicators of child anguish that include depression, anxiety, and suicide (an uptick that has accelerated dramatically during the pandemic, according to the CDC). In response to this crisis, the article tells us, some large districts and several states have seen fit to sanction mental health days for children.
The NYT author next produces an expert to weigh in on the matter: psychiatrist Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, medical director of the Child Mind Institute of New York City. Koplewicz declares that the ideal use of the mental health day is to “celebrate your child’s efforts in school”—for example, when she has just completed a big project. In that case he says taking a day off afterwards is “perfectly appropriate.” Koplewicz, however, “cautions” against helping “your child avoid situations at school that are making them uncomfortable.” In such cases Dr. Koplewicz counsels to “pinpoint where the anxiety is coming from. ‘Are they avoiding something because it is too challenging? Are they being hurt in some way?’ he asked.”
Those darned internal indicators of discomfort that our children so inconveniently flash our way sometimes, and that we would so prefer to disregard. Can we countenance that those indicators are quite possibly there as safety checks? To call attention to the obvious: if they are “avoiding something because it is too challenging,” maybe what is too challenging is the entire insane schedule we’ve foisted on them, causing their bodies to be deprived of the sleep bodies simply require for physical and mental health. And aren’t they indeed “being hurt in some way?”—and I don’t mean by playground bullies.
It’s great, and a baby step forward, that children’s emotional suffering is being acknowledged in the form of sanctioning mental health days. However, maybe the full-throttle alarms of their internal indicators should be jolting us from our complacency. Dr. Koplewicz, I beg of you: with schedules like Ben Ballman’s, might children’s need for a break be a sign that something is seriously screwed up in the world of adult expectations of kids? What is it their parents and grandparents have bought into that forces them to the brink with our consent, and apparently yours as well?
It goes without saying that when human beings are young their elders substantially form the adults they will be. As the Jesuits said centuries ago, “Give me the boy until he is seven years old, and I will give you the man.” We mold their sense of what is important, what is possible and what isn’t, what their job is and what it isn’t. (Indeed, that’s what our parents did with us, and their parents did with them, and so on.) Of the many consequences to stretching children beyond their limits and representing that stretching as a normal state of affairs. I will mention one right now: that we implant in them the complementary ideas that deserving people must never cease from their toils, and that efficiency is important for survival.
A person with some time, who values creative thought, can mull over, consult her inner compass, think creatively. I would say, very few have that kind of time in this era that spawned the relationship we have with Covid. That kind of thought doesn’t always appear to be productive and efficient, and we typically don’t teach our children to value it.
In a climate of “no time,” we get sick because we are stressed, which causes our immune systems to function poorly. We get sick because we are not in touch with our hearts and therefore can’t follow its wisdom and in-sight. We get sick because, lacking the time to adequately question information, we defer too completely to experts who, frankly, understand human health in only the fragmentary, rule-bound way our culture currently favors. (They, too, were possibly brought up to deaden the messaging of their own hearts.) We get sick because, having deified efficiency, we turn matters over to technocrats who actually are only privy to a small part of the overall picture of human health. When all the parts of us that those experts discount are disappointed, our training teaches us to carry on, unsurprised.
Fear of exploring our own perceptions (groundwork for that fear having been laid down in childhood), and the overwork that is a symptom of that fear, are critical features of the Covid environment. In that environment experts man the pulpit, but only those that power favors. We find it ridiculous to question them. The Dr. Koplewiczes of the world are always available to reinforce this status quo just in case anyone thinks of stepping out of line.
Covid Snapshot
A little while ago I put together a document containing four “exhibits.” My great interest is not specifically to change the reader’s way of thinking about how we might ideally address the pandemic. People hold the beliefs they do for reasons that run very deep, and I make every effort to present information with respect for that fact.
In this environment, we have many people and entities working very hard to get us to think in very specific ways. I think, if we can get people to think freely and creatively, to engage with people who disagree with them, to participate in civil and sincere discussions (as we clearly are not), we will be on the way to solving our Covid problem without horrific amounts of collateral damage. To that end, please take in the four exhibits, all of which are legitimately data-based as far as I can tell, and consider adjusting your picture of this situation on their merits. Then, if you notice a problem with any of them, please do leave a comment.
Exhibit A
Compilation from FDA/CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) Data.
Source: compiled from VAERS data, August 5, by VaccineTruth (not to be confused with Vaccinetruth.org).
Exhibit B
Early treatment is reported to work splendidly. Here I mention just one protocol for treating Covid with cheap repurposed drugs. Source: VaccineTruth (not to be confused with VaccineTruth.org).
Background: AVUC is a clinic in highly vulnerable Imperial County, CA. At AVUC, Drs. Fareed and Tyson quietly developed and tweaked up a protocol of older drugs and vitamins whereby they have been curing 99.76% of their patients. 6000 have been treated with no reported side effects. The average age of patients undergoing the protocol is 60 (i.e., likely more vulnerable than average) and no one is turned away. This particular protocol includes aspirin and zinc as well as four cheap, well-researched, repurposed drugs. The protocol appears to work equally well for the Delta variant.
Exhibit C
As is widely reported and non-controversial, 90% of the media in the US are owned by just 6 different corporations.
What about the other 10%? A number are individually owned by our favorite billionaires. You can also consult addictivetips.com to round out the information in the first link.
Many people I know trust the New York Times implicitly. The NYT is publicly traded, with “A” shares that you could possibly purchase yourself, and “B” shares that are only available to certain insiders. Like the others, it has a profit motive that mustn’t be ignored. To remind yourself of the painful reality that the New York Times answers to markets just as the Disney Channel does, please review this list of its current Board of Directors. As a business, it answers to someone’s sense of what is or is not to be published/emphasized. The board answers to advertisers and the interests of shareholders, like any corporation.
Exhibit D
Here is a list of organizations that spend the most influencing the US government. (Source: Opensecrets.org, 2020 data). Check out those dollar amounts. As you can see, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America is near the top. Could it be possible that that organization has some say in the day-to-day of our top federal health agencies? Further, surely Pfizer expected something in return for that $13,150,000. Maybe its expected profits of $33.5 billion in 2021 qualify.