The Real Health Care Crisis

Health care reform is the political topic of the year, and thank the gods, but here's the thing. It's hard to stay clear and focused on a political movement to fix a broken system when, on an everyday basis, most of us are in hardcore denial that we need the system in the first place.

In our culture, it's normal to be in denial that we're human. We've set up our lives so that we're reminded of the fact as little as possible.

For example, bathroom activities are about taking care of the animal of our bodies, and in our culture, these are private, secret, even shameful. Privacy is one thing, but we overdo it. Think about how a lot of kids react to anyone seeing them naked or knowing they're going potty: distress and shame. The message they're getting is that it isn't OK to be human.

And in the process of taking care of our bodies, we consider certain unnatural adjustments normal, such as eliminating body hair, wearing makeup, coiffing hair, whitening teeth... We wear deodorant so as to not smell like an organic creature, and we wear cologne and perfume so as to smell like something else entirely.

Some of us, with the blessing of society, even wage war on our bodies with harsh, unforgiving diet and exercise regimens, failing to listen to our bodies' signals that we're overdoing it. Injury is a common result -- it's one of the body's ways to make us stop hurting ourselves.

Then there's sex. For many people, sex is strictly compartmentalized from the rest of their lives. They don't allow themselves to express any sexuality outside the bedroom, and some even disapprove of sex in general. Seriously. That's like disapproving of eating or breathing. (Religion sure doesn't help.)

I could go on and on.

If you don't relate to this, if you feel absolutely no twinge of shame at acknowledging to strangers details about your body's size, shape or function, and your sexuality is an integral and appropriate part of your everyday identity, congratulations. You're either incredibly healthy and whole, having overcome the pervasive pressures of society and accepted yourself fully, or you weren't properly socialized and have poor or nonexistent boundaries. Either way, you're not normal.

The rest of us were programmed with shame about our humanness in order to control and minimize our animal behavior.

I am not arguing for a decrease in hygiene standards here, or arguing against healthy self-improvement. I'm just calling out all the ways we save ourselves on a daily basis from the reality of our physical state. We are organic creatures in soft, vulnerable bodies.

And because we like to avoid this particular truth as much as possible, the capitalist organizations in charge of taking care of us when we're sick have been allowed to grow and mutate and infest our economy relatively unchecked. Because if we're not sick, we prefer not to think about it.

Actually, allowed is the wrong word. We (as a culture) have required that they do this. We've made ourselves unavailable to conversations about how best to care for our health. We've refused to listen to their facts about what will happen if we keep smoking or eating fast food. We've demanded pills to fix us, and we haven't really wanted to know what's in the pills, how they're developed or what the costs are to us, society or the planet. We've abdicated responsibility for our well-being for decades and expected them to save us without protest when our bodies fail.

We've felt entitled to health and wellness without sacrifice or effort, because we are in daily denial of our physical humanness.

Luckily, this is changing. The current administration has made it a mission to break through our denial and help us face reality at the political and economic levels.

It remains our task, individually and as families or other supportive groups, to challenge our own denial and make some choices about how it's working for us. Are we OK with validating each other's denial? Are we OK with validating each other's sense of betrayal and victimhood when our bodies fail? Or are we open to new ways of supporting and accepting each other in real health and wellness?

This is the continuum, and we all fall somewhere between the two extremes. Movement seems to be generally in the positive direction. Let's keep it up.

Here's an idea that may help. When you look at how you take care of yourself -- how you eat, how you exercise, what feels "good enough" in these areas -- ask yourself, where did you learn this? Who modeled this behavior, and who taught you these habits?

Then ask yourself if keeping up these habits is an expression of loyalty to that person. It often is. Breaking out of bad habits often requires permission to stop demonstrating loyalty in that way.

So... does/would your mother want you to continue unhealthy habits, just because she didn't know any better at the time? Would you want your kids to do so? To keep eating ingredient X, for example, because you taught them to, even if, by the time they're grown, ingredient X is know to be a poison?

I hope that helps. Here's to health, vitality, energy and joy for humans of all shapes, sizes, ages and abilities!