Dear New School Friends,
First of all, I want to thank all of you for staying with The New School through the past year of extraordinary turmoil. The pandemic, the politics, the disruption of our lives, and all the rest. I want you to know that The New School is alive, vibrant, and benefitting from the guidance of Kyra Epstein, my partner in all The New School’s work.
It’s been some time since I have written to you, although I have continued to record New School conversations (which you can find on our website). As some of you know, the past year has been an interesting one for me. I had a major surgery for an abdominal aortric aneurysm at the end of July 2020. I went through seven months of steady recovery. Then I was told I could exercise. I did and immediately popped some hernias along the incision line. I was told I needed a second quite significant surgery to put mesh over the hernias. But a wise old vascular surgeon told me that, in his experience, people my age (77) who have a second significant surgery before the first is fully healed rarely regain their full energy. He said I would know when my first surgery was healed when the incision line turns white. I am still a good distance from white.
Meanwhile I learned that mesh surgeries for hernias go south about 10% of the time. When they do, repairs can get you into a debilitating cycle. Moreover, living with the hernia also goes south about 10% of the time. But some people live long periods of time without getting the surgery. And they avoid the hit on their life energy which long surgeries under general anesthetic in older people generally exact. So as I write to you, I am living with the hernias. I am waiting to decide on the surgery until the scar line turns white and announces full healing. If the hernias begin to develop further, of course I’d need to risk an earlier surgery.
My whole working life has been devoted to exploring the interface of healing ourselves and healing the earth. I’m living wounded now and God know mother earth is living wounded. And so are every single one of us. Whether we know it or not.
I haven’t stopped working throughout this year of COVID and my own personal healing adventure. I am still fully engaged with all of Commonweal’s work. But I am deeply grateful that in each project I participate in we have excellent leadership. This leaves me free to focus where my attention is most needed. That includes, first, working with our leadership team guiding Commonweal as a whole; second, working on a major relaunch of our Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies website bcct.ngo, which will emerge with a new name, CancerChoices; third, working our our resilience work at resilienceproject.ngo and omega.ngo; fourth, working with Kyra Epstein in guiding The New School; and fifth, working on a small experimental website, covidstrategies.org.
I launched CovidStrategies.org because the pandemic sits right at the interface between healing ourselves and healing the earth. You can’t escape its significance for our personal health or the health of the whole earth system. COVID is the poster child for the global polycrisis you’ll find described at resilienceproject.ngo. It’s also a global threat to human health.
CovidStrategies focuses on three things. First, we curate selections from the ongoing flow of science and news—the interesting stuff you might otherwise miss. Second, we situate the pandemic in the polycrisis—show how it interrelates with the two dozen other global stressors that are interacting with increasing speed, force, and unpredictability that you find described at resilienceproject.ngo. Third, we focus on the controversial therapies like ivermectin, which are at the center of a pitched battle between advocates and opponents.
We try not to take sides. We present both sides of the argument over ivermectin and other controversial therapies. But we can’t avoid the reality that the debate over repurposed drugs and other “outsider therapies” runs directly up against the interests of Big Pharma. So we have an impression that some of the research into these “outsider therapies” is being slow walked at best. We don’t know what the outcome of that research will be. But having spent over 35 years researching outsider cancer therapies, we know for certain that some of those therapies end up in the mainstream. That is what the history of science teaches us.
So we follow the science, yes. But whose science? And when the media algorithms are deliberately skewed against anything other than mainstream science (this is not a rumor, it is a known fact), how will we even know about the legitimate debates over the outsider therapies? When mainstream science is suffused and often even defined by the immense interests of the medical industrial complex, who can we trust to give us even a preliminary sense of where the truth may lie?
Hence CovidStrategies.org. It’s a tiny experimental website organized by Sue Evans, CovidStrategies coordinator, and me with the assistance of a remarkable advisory group of physicians, health practitioners, and public health advocates. It is still in its early stages but far enough along to deserve a look.
In every field which I have ever investigated in depth, the official truth about things is rarely more than a cover story for what is actually going on. What is actually going on is usually infinitely complex, debated, and extremely difficult to decipher.
But that’s what makes life interesting.
Stay well. Stay safe. Don’t ever give up. Work on the side of the angels.
Love and prayers,
Michael
