Choosing Love

Choosing Love - Musings on Tipping Points

Taking the opportunity to re-read “The Tipping Point” (2000) and now just finishing “Revenge of the Tipping Point” (2024), both by Malcolm Gladwell, I hoped to spark a flame within myself on how to discuss the importance of the upcoming American election. How do we rally our friends, family and loved ones to choose love? It should be easy, how could we not? Well, we didn't in 2016. We chose fear, which is easier to sell.

I highly recommend the writings of Malcolm Gladwell, and his journalistic delving into the sociology and psychology of change. His latest endeavor, interestingly, focuses on doctor practices from Medicare fraud, to super-spreaders and the Covid pandemic, to Purdue Pharma and the narcotic epidemic, and the influenceability of some physicians.

The books, taken together, show that big changes can come from small influences. And that ideas are probably more contagious than viruses. What causes those ideas to stick can occur at levels you are not even aware of.
Furthermore, a critical mass is necessary to bring about change, a precipitous change that defies your ability to believe that it is even possible!

The model I use for Integrative Medicine comes from Plato: “The Good, The Beautiful, and The True”. These are the three spheres of inquiry to evaluate any situation. As a doctor, usually used in evaluating imbalances or diseases, these spheres relate to ethics/the higher self/spirit (The Good), the emotional/energetic body (The Beautiful - “All Senses for Healing”) and the physical/measurable world (The True).

Ethics represents the highest good present within all of us, uncorrupted by religious “morality”. Religion can be a path to self-awareness. The most important truth I can impart to you is that you cannot be well unless you attend to this sphere. The Holocaust was not healthy for nazi or Jew. One cannot ignore ethical obligations, or we all pay the price.

Our next election takes us to the choice of compassion or fear. There are no “others”, just people who are a reflection of you. No immigrants, illegal or otherwise, simply people who need help from persecution, just like your forefathers. There is only one human race, yet a construct of differences in appearance persists, deceiving you into believing in race, and thus racism. That I need to point out that a woman has the right to control her own body shows how deep the deception goes.