THE PATRIOTISM OF SELFCARE

When selfcare and wellness become patriotic, will you be inspired?

Have you noticed? When we Americans are asked to make sacrifices, it usually involves fighting an enemy and sending soldiers to war. Patriotic duty and sacrificing for country are things we know well and applaud often.

Yet, war is by no means the only threat we face. Other challenges exist and many come from within our borders. Patriotism as we know it cannot save us from escalating healthcare costs or an addiction epidemic or a mass shooting every 21 hours.

With science telling us that poor diet and lifestyle are causing chronic illness, that violence has biological roots, and that addiction is a disease, we know what needs to be done and that it requires some changes in our everyday lives. And we must also know that government alone cannot save us from what we are doing to ourselves.

What will it take to engage Americans in changing the way we live? Who will ask us to examine our daily lives and take up wellness to save our country? What will it take to convince us that taking better care of ourselves is also about taking better care of America?

In short, how do we make good selfcare a patriotic act?

And who will lead us in doing this? Who will tell us the truth about why we are so sick? Few leaders seem to be drawing the links between how we live our everyday lives and the challenges we face as families and as a country. We are free to live as we choose, but we need leaders who are willing to ask us to sacrifice something besides sons and daughters to war. Leaders willing to ask us to take better care of ourselves.

It will not be an easy ask. For so long now, we have held up the American way of life as something to be proud of, something for everyone to aspire to. Even more difficult: our economy is built around the lifestyles that are making us sick. Change will not be easy, but nothing is impossible when we have the right understanding of why we are sick and what we can do to support freedom with responsibility.

Our challenges, inside and outside our borders, will require a healthier population than we currently have. And this will require better selfcare by ‘we the people’. When we engage together as the village that is needed to save our children - their health and our future - we will be rebuilding a strong America.

We need leaders who are willing to call selfcare patriotic, who are willing to ask Americans to make personal sacrifices, not just for war but for wellness and freedom and healthy children. These will be the leaders who turn America’s debilitating crises of chronic illness and violence and addiction into a restoration of true strength and freedom. These leaders will engage ‘we the people’ in understanding how to save our fathers from heart disease, our mothers from cancer, our children from autism and our elders from dementia. These leaders will be those who can equate saving ourselves with the saving of America. Who call ‘we the people’ to a patriotism of selfcare and wellness.

Living Well Locally believes that Americans will come together to understand the lessons of lost health and to reclaim the health of our children. As a democracy born from a love of freedom and opportunity, richly gifted with entrepreneurial spirit, and given to humanitarian values, America is uniquely capable of change. For decades, alternative practitioners in clinics and on farms have been developing and honing the regenerative methods that can restore America’s health. Our leaders will help us recognize them and make their work mainstream.

Perhaps most importantly, as a country we are learning that true and lasting freedom requires an equal measure of responsibility. And that freedom without health may not be freedom at all.

America has long envisioned itself as a protector and promoter of democracy for everyone. Will we eventually come to see that America’s Great Work is also to promote wellness and the responsibility that wellness and freedom both require?