Your entire life¶

Your entire life, you have been told:

1) Sickness is unavoidable.

2) Sickness is no big deal, thanks to modern medicine.

3) If it is a big deal, it's "cosmically just." It was either "just their time," or they somehow deserved it.

All three of these things are dead wrong. 1 is wrong because you can avoid both getting and spreading sickness. On a social level, we can and ought to be protecting each other from transmissible diseases, engineering and freely distributing cures and prophylactics, and ensuring the biological security of our environment. 2 is wrong because ANY sickness is a negative outcome, and "modern medicine" is sadly ill-equipped to deal with the scale of those outcomes. Your immune system works very hard to protect you, but it is also incredibly fragile. It's not a muscle to be trained, it is a resource. 3 is wrong because the way your body interacts with pathogens is unpredictable. ANYONE can become seriously ill for reasons outside control or understanding. There are no Fates sagely weaving deserved disability or death into the strand of your existence: you deserve health. Public health is a complex field that draws together biology, sociology, ecology, physics, politics, and more. Every social sphere intersects with public health, and like everything else in our society, it is firmly regimented toward the ideological aims of the ruling class. What may seem like obvious goals to us are anathema to those who dictate public policy. We want to be healthy. We want to be safe. They want only to balance the cost of keeping enough of the population healthy for capitalism to function against the benefit of our subjugation. A truly functioning public health system would dedicate immense resources toward that end. Our entire economy would be structured around human health, ecological fortitude, and social welfare. This is the primary purpose of human society. Instead, all of these are subordinate. Illness, violence, starvation, exploitation, environmental degradation, inequality, imperialism, injustice... The passive acceptance of all of these things as inevitable and natural is central to the grip of capitalist hegemony. Discard them. You deserve better. You deserve life.