Building Bridges Between Factions

Here's the talk I gave to the Philadelphia FIGHT Prevention Summit when receiving the Kiyoshi Award, on June 11, 2019. You can comment below. Comments will be moderated for relevance, which means addressing the problem of polarization, not trying to score points for one side or the other.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a hero and model to so many people, was born in prison - an internment camp where Japanese Americans were confined in World War II. He accomplished much, including introducing people with AIDS to computers. And his testimony in a Supreme Court case likely stopped a Federal law that would have made it a felony to publish explicit AIDS prevention information online.

I published AIDS Treatment News for 20 years. Now I'm 78, and started a site on healthy aging, Healthspan21.com. But something else is important today.

Look at the state of the world, the whole world. It's not good, the viciousness and factions. Clueless elites confront distressed populations. But there is something we can do about it, something politicians are missing. 

There could be an alliance between many Trump supporters and many opponents - an alliance to reduce the barriers to simply having a home and family, access to healthcare, and a decent job with a living wage. Today one party pretends to offer relief some day, the other party doesn't even pretend. (And if you think you know which party I assigned to which, try reversing the parties; it works either way.)

Many solutions are in plain sight, but ignored. For example, Philadelphia has a housing crisis. It also has a law that usually makes it illegal for people to form their own communities and live together at half the cost. Experiments must be underground, not openly discussed.

Or on healthcare, in Philadelphia your ZIP code makes a huge difference in your life expectancy. A major reason is healthcare access. All the business incentives push healthcare prices up; and in a very unequal society, pricing at what the market will bear guarantees that millions are left out. And barriers to care mean that you don't see a doctor until late, when problems are already serious and advanced.

So what can we do? As ordinary people we can't fix the economy or healthcare. But can form pressure groups to push politicians to pay attention to what they are missing. And we can build real alliances across the factions.

I'll put this discussion on Healthspan21.com, so we could meet up there.