July is Rotary International 'Maternal and Child Health' Month!
Maternal Wellbeing, infant and child mental health, family Support, schools & communities, compassion & connection, and reliable protection. All 26 Rotary Action Groups work on these because it takes far more than a community to raise a healthy child.
Yet, giving birth may be the most
dangerous part of a woman’s life. Her
heroism is often overlooked due to the human expectation that this is expected
of her. But no female should never have to experience
that risk alone. Or miss the most basic
needs for a healthy and safe delivery of new life into this troubled, hyper complex, complected, connected, interdependent, and disruptive era.
As a young male, I’d always created my purpose in life, modeled after people (including women) I admired. But witnessing my wife’s birthing of our
first child, my grounded purpose came naturally.
When I started working to end
world hunger in 1979 approximately 42,000 infants were dying daily, from easily
preventable malnutrition and infectious disease. A death rate nearly 10 times that of those in Hitler’s
Concentration Camps. As a biology teacher in the late 70s I had never heard this hidden infant holocaust. In HS and college courses I'd learned that
hunger was a result of an overcrowded world. I had been unintentionally disinformed by smart people that the earth was overpopulated and there was not enough food. Then I taught this to my biology classes until I was told the Truth. And that was
confirmed in 1980 by a bi-partisan Presidential Commission on World
Hunger and other studies. Yet for years I've attempted to 'school' others, who have persistently refused to change their very intelligent minds. Since 2017 after reading the middle chapter in the book 'Warnings' by Richard Clark I started focusing on why we don't listen to experts.
Humankind has always had the
capacity to feed the world sustainably - and a mind that can believe anything... But hunger was never an issue of money, resources, or lack of solutions. It was simply a lack of “Political
Will”. In the early 70s I’d swore to my mother
I’d never get involved with politics. That changed overnight. Then, after doing a deep dive into hunger issues I quickly
learned it was directly connected to other important issues (national security, health, environment, economic systems,
and politics). That
took me, my wife, and two children from the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California to Washington DC to focus on using the media to create non-partisan political will. Doing that for quickly
educated me on the wisdom needed to address women’s health and other root causes
of high infant mortality, public and environmental health, education, female
empowerment, plus other fundamental human rights - like a need for economic security, global
health security, for people and nature - each inseparable from national security issues and our dysfunctional government systems (both national
and global). They have been in need to be unrigged
and transformed for decades. Protecting nature and human rights required a global justice system. Not a useless system of international laws that remain a good idea, but inherently unenforceable.
All of this culminated in a focus on the final frontier - human cognition. How we think, what we think about, and the multitude of challenge in getting people to change their stubborn minds to meet this increasingly urgent global need.
In the last half of the second paragraph within the 1776 Declaration there is profound observation of this insanity. It is not a new mental problem. “...all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Having just watched the movie "The Odyssey" and its final closing line, this same insanity has existed at least 700 years before Christ, within the Laws of Zeus. Our species has always known that a healthy mind leads to healthy bodies, families, social spirit, communities, environment, government, and economic systems. Food scarcity was never the issue. Only poverty, male greed for money and power, and our collective mindless waste of resources and lacking the wisdom of indigenous cultures.
Over the past 4.5 decades many
things have improved. But still, approximately
11,000 to 13.,000 infants still die daily - even without any wars, genocides (that
kill more people than wars), or natural disasters.
We are afraid of many things. What should be obvious is the immense natural fear of losing a child being the greatest
terror in the world. With the greatest horror actually losing one...or the mother. Both largely due to a lack of “political will”.
Together, these two natural emotions (terror and horror) have a greater impact on humanity,
than any war, genocide, revolution, pandemic, or natural disaster.
Maternal and child health should remind us that the health of every family is connected to the health of every
community globally. Thus, a global health approach begins where people live—by ensuring that
every community and village globally has access to a well-equipped community health
clinic, adequately financed and focused first on prevention, early detection, education, and rapid
response.
This should become Rotary International's greatest priority, that would ensure success of its other Rotary inspired feat, the global eradication of Polio.
Such clinics globally could protect mothers and newborns, improve nutrition and immunization, detect outbreaks before they spread, strengthen mental health, family well-being, community unity, and connect local needs to regional and global support that is urgently needed. Investing in community health is one of the most practical and cost-effective ways to build healthier, safer, and more peaceful, secure, resilient, and sustainable societies.
Every child deserves the
opportunity for a healthy start with every mother receiving timely care close
to home. The benefits extend far beyond one family to all life everywhere on earth.
They strengthen communities, nations, and ultimately our sustainable future by making it easier to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. A global plan already approved to address the root causes of almost every threat we face.
Paul
Harris, the founder of Rotary International in 1905 offered humankind a
solution that clearly fits our meta-poly crisis era - "If Rotary is to
realize its proper destiny, it must be evolutionary at all times, REVOLUTIONARY
on occasion."-----Paul Harris
"Civilization
can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a
new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in
opposition to it. A new public opinion must be created privately and
unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by
organization, and by financial influences which are at its disposal. The
unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one which goes
from man to man and relies solely on the truth of thoughts and the hearer’s
receptiveness of new truth." – Albert Schweitzer
"It
is as if we are trapped in a death spiral with a map that only takes us in
circles. We persistently ignore the exit
signs because we insist on believing in the map we have in hand. You never
change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build
a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~Buckminster
Fuller
“In
order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the
problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That,
in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called.” ~
Buckminster Fuller
Unfortunately, evidence suggests
most people are NOT ready for
change! They are...
● Comfortable
and don't feel the need for change. Why change?
● Not
educated about the state of the world.
No need to change.
● Simply
don't care. Apathy and no empathy.
● Confident
in our modern worldview and that we are heading in the right direction.
Technology solves all.
● Insufficiently
capable of mentally understanding reality.
● Too
busy to be concerned about issues that they believe don't effect them.
● Distracted
and mesmerized by entertainment and consumer media.
● Unenergized
by the food or drugs they are putting into their bodies.
● In
deep denial about the future. Refuse to face it.
● Religious
belief that God has it all under control. Our involvement isn't needed.
Look for change makers and make
things happen.
"Silence, they say, is the
voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams. Silence is a
message, just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out &
resonate in every word & every deed. Yes, become who you are. There's no
sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you
are. You are your own comeuppance. You become your own message. You are the
message. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse " Leonard Peletier
“We do not need to change human nature. We
need to reveal it.”. George Monbiot,
Becoming Unstoppable Nov. 2017
