Southwest, Tivo, and PBS join The Revolution

It’s pretty amazing when something comes into your life and
changes your heading from one direction to another. The view is totally
different. This is how the idea of community acupuncture affected me,
everywhere I look now days I see something directed toward the ideas of
building community or reliving some of the pressure created by the inequality
in our society.

In March, my wife and I were flying to San
Diego to attend Dr. Richard Tan’s Balance Conference. The
March issue of Spirit magazine (the Southwest airlines magazine I bury
my head in each time I fly so I don’t use the little paper “Sick Bag”) there
was a great article about a nonprofit organization named Bonnie CLAC that “provide(s) financial
literacy training, car buying assistance and loan guarantees to individuals
from all walks of life.” http://www.spiritmag.com/2008_03/clickthis/03bonnie.php

Cool, huh?

So now my Tivo is picking up on the theme. Seriously, the
person who invented Tivo deserves a medal. All on its own it recorded two
episodes of a four part mini-series airing on PBS called Unnatural Causes...is inequality
making us sick? The idea is to look at what else is affecting our
health besides the usual suspects of micro-organisms, genes, smoking, or diet
(or maybe even yin deficiency). From the mini-series website, “the series sheds
light on mounting evidence of how lack of access to power and resources can get
under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses. It
also reveals a health gradient tied to wealth: those at the top of the class
pyramid average longer, healthier lives, while those at the bottom are the most
disempowered, get sicker more often and die sooner. Most of us fall somewhere
in between.”

I believe my psychology 101 professor called this life
changing phenomenon a “paradigm shift.” Well, it seems big enough that even my
Tivo is seeing things in a new way.