Some scientists think that controlling the inflammation and immune system response could solve the virulent attack the flu virus makes on the body. Another objects that the answer is rather in the rapidity with which the virus grows, but no solution is offered.

What if neither one is correct? What if science is missing the point partially or entirely? Will any of the scientists think to wonder what exactly the body is fighting when this flu virus attacks? Is the immune system going after the virus itself, or is it protecting itself so intensely from the by-products created in the body by the virus? (Or perhaps it’s doing both at once, thus placing too high a burden on a system that doesn’t have the needed materiel to fight the battle.)

Does the body find itself forced to use its very blood to attack microbes directly, or could it be bringing the blood to the lungs in a desperate attempt to convey needed substances – perhaps electrolyte minerals to an area acidifying at much too fast a pace? Is the presence of blood in the lungs possibly a sign, then, that the body has no other reserves of alkaline minerals remaining with which to buffer the virus’s by-products, and is that fact what causes death from the flu strain?

And could the rapidity of virus growth be checked, then, say, simply by alkalizing the tissues? Even if one hadn’t been following an alkaline diet, and thus the virus was able to take hold in the acidic system, could an immediate and sustained course of mineral supplementation help the body fight its way back to stasis? I strongly suspect it could. There is growing holistic opinion that disease cannot live in an alkaline body.

Here’s another article I just read yesterday. It’s about some medical researchers who “revalidated” the work of a 17th-century physician, discoverer of antibacterial properties in a rare tree found in Indonesia.

In some ways, it is a wonder that the work survived at all. In 1670, at the age of 42, Rumphius went blind. In 1687, his still unpublished manuscript and all of his illustrations were destroyed in a fire that swept through the European quarter of Ambon. Undaunted, he dictated a new version and commissioned artists to draw new illustrations.

Fortunately, the second time around he kept a copy of the manuscript. The original was lost when the ship carrying it back to the Netherlands was sunk by a French naval squadron. Still unfazed, Rumphius continued his work, finishing the last volume shortly before his death in 1702…

Specimens finally in hand, the scientists began the laboratory work. They preserved the leaves and kernels in ethanol, and then prepared alcohol extracts of them. They added various concentrations of the potion to samples of four common bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecalis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli. The extracts showed antibacterial effect specific to S. aureus and E. coli. The extract made from the kernels was even more effective than that made from the leaves.

Could a new antibiotic be developed from the plant? Dr. Buenz is hopeful, noting that preliminary data have shown that the extract is effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or M.R.S.A., a common and sometimes fatal hospital infection resistant to many antibiotics…

Dr. Brent A. Bauer, an associate professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and a co-author of the paper, said the work showed that “we were able to validate what many people already believe, which is that some of this indigenous knowledge that has come down from generation to generation is actually valid.”

Dr. Bauer added, “It’s humbling.”

It damn well ought to be humbling, and you damn well ought to have the grace to admit it. You people stand on the shoulders of giants, yet you consider them all pygmies – and savage, subhuman ones at that. Giants who withstood torture, ridicule, theft, shunning, terror, and even execution to preserve the accumulated knowledge of untold centuries. Rumphius and you both showed that the extract of the tree’s seeds and leaves – a simple alcohol-based decoction, freely available from the bounty of Nature – is effective against the infections that concern you. But a plant can’t be patented, and a decoction can’t be controlled by prescription.

So you and your kind will take this free (to you) knowledge, paid for by the superhuman dedication, financial ruin, and on-the-brink despair of a (blind, no less!) scientific hero, and you’ll go get hired at some Big Pharma research lab that’ll be glad to pay you a comfortable salary to design a drug they can patent, force through FDA approval, and make billions of dollars selling direct to cowed consumers via TV ads filled with unintelligibly glib recitations of potential side effects. Then they’ll make the really big time selling your swill to Third World governments who pay them with U.S. taxpayer dollars they received in “foreign aid.”

I’m not a doctor, and (as the joke goes) I don’t even play one on TV. But then, the longer I mosey around this old world, the more I hear about people who aren’t getting the answers they need from their doctors. I do applaud those doctors and researchers who are opening their minds and practices to new – to them, but usually well-honored by time – paths of healing, and I want to see more such good medical folk doing the same. Eventually they’re going to have to accept the vast body of experiential evidence that already exists and is growing mightily.

They keep reminding us in school that there isn’t any such thing as a healer – the body heals itself. At least as well as it can, given what it has on hand to work with.

I took my dog for a walk down the street,

and snow began to fall gently

as darkness descended,

and everyone else went inside to get warm.

I slipped on some ice –

my boots didn’t have treads –

but no one saw,

since they all had gone.

I suddenly got the urge to be me.

So I ran –

skipped –

jumped –

and my joyfully yapping dog bounded after me

as I plunged into a snowbank.

And I cried out haha!

Because no one had seen.

Stars whistle

And fall

Through the heavens.

Moon in silver silk

Waltzes, fairylike,

In night’s black velvet arms.

Sun beams through

All the vivid music

Of living,

Of loving.

This tune,

Humming, chanting,

In my deep soul,

Knows no limits of fancy.

And the song is

I AM THE LIGHT.

When you come across the friends who used to know all your secrets, but whom you haven’t seen in twenty years, where do you start? “So, Lisa, what do you do now – you making good money?” just doesn’t satisfy.

Such deep and meaningful talks we had, my buds and I, those long evenings over the phone, while Dad grumbled and we were supposed by all to be collaborating over calculus homework. Life, to us then, was Friday nights at the mall, shadowing the guys we had crushes on, and sneaking in to see the R-rated “Purple Rain” when we were only 16 (well, 15 and ten months). We were tight, back then, friends indeed.

I know, you’re supposed to go into a reunion ready to brag about all your successes in adult life, and armored and ready to listen to everyone else’s boasts too. Somebody’s living the high life on Wall Street, one guy we all liked was playing major-league baseball for a time, and several of the Barbie girls are married to doctors and orthodontists now, I’m sure. Good for them!

But, when I wonder what I’ll say to all those long-lost friends from high school, their jobs and finances, even their families, aren’t the topics on my mind. No, what I want to ask them is this: What have you learned about life? How are you a wiser, better person now, and how is your life better than it used to be?

Life has been so full and delectable since then, that I’ll have lots of juicy stuff to answer with if anyone asks me those questions back! For instance:

If nothing else, I’ll have a few topics of conversation to propose at that reunion! What do you or I do for a living? Who cares? Statistics and life experience say it’ll change soon anyhow. Nah, let me ask you this instead – what do we do for a LIFE?

And who says youth is bliss? Happiness is knowing where you want to go AND being able to drive your own car to get there.

And, when we think about what we expect and want our government to do for us, much of it is what some would call good for the people: build highways, subsidize schools, etc. Sure, you could make out a case for them, right? But if you try, consider this: someone’s paying for it all, and “someone” might well be you.

In an early episode of The West Wing, President Bartlet, as a candidate during the New Hampshire primary, admits to a dairy farmer that some legislation he voted for when he was in Congress meant that the farmer “got screwed.” Bartlet then justifies his vote by saying that somebody had to lose in the deal, and poor people who needed milk shouldn’t have been the losers.

I say that NO ONE should be a loser by what our government decides. If there has to be a loser, there shouldn’t be a deal at all.

Our government can’t even play by the simple rules we all learned before age six: Don’t take what’s not yours. (See U.S. Constitution, Amendment Article V: “…nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” See? Social Security and eminent domain are unconstitutional.) Play fair. Treat people right and with respect. Clean up your own messes. I sound like Robert Fulghum here, but you get the idea. We all know that decency is basic and understood by most people.

So I’m going to propose a radical new standard for our governmental operations: If it ain’t good for EVERYONE, then you, benevolent leaders, have no business in it. By EVERYONE I mean the decent, law-abiding citizens of the U.S.A., those who work their tails off and pay the taxes to keep this country going.

We cheer when someone, like Kevin Kline’s character in the movie Dave, figures out the obvious, and shows us how simple it really is to cut government spending and balance a budget. But what do we do about it ourselves? Sure, no one wants to run for Congress nowadays, not with the way they’d make hash of every parking ticket you ever got, not considering the kind of deals you’d have to make to get the campaign cash you’d need. Most of us are just too sensible.

Anyway, we KNOW that our government is way out of control on spending and in the way it treats US, its own supporters-in-chains. Please note that I refer always to OUR government. We need to remember that that’s exactly what it is.

There’s no reason why we can’t, as free individuals, spend our own money to support studies of the mating habits of houseflies, or subsidize rulers of other countries in what we see as charitable purposes. We’re perfectly able to do so as and when we choose. More power to you if you do so: you should always put some money and energy where your values are.

But then what would our government be doing if I had my way? Well, first of all, it wouldn’t be doing 99 per cent of what it does today. It wouldn’t fake us into thinking it’s planning for us to have a prosperous retirement while stealing our money AND the interest it should be earning. It wouldn’t butt in presumptuously making choices for us that we, as adults, are fully capable of making for ourselves, thank you very much. Don’t tread on me, man.

What our government WOULD be doing is simple: protecting from harm, violence and fraud the people who pay to keep it functioning.

This means domestic redress of wrongs, the punishing of true, harmful crimes of force and fraud, through police and the courts, and it means national protection from foreign threats, through a reliable and ready military.

Doesn’t this also mean, for instance, that our government should provide jobs for the “disadvantaged”, or free health care and day care to anyone who qualifies, since that would keep them from harm? No way. Why? Because in order to pay for such jobs and services, our government would harm, by taking money and perhaps other commodities from, people who work to keep the economy going to PROVIDE the jobs and such.

Our founders knew it and made it clear: You can’t have a government that favors one group of people at the expense of other groups. Yet, that’s exactly what we have today.

When someone tells you that a government edict is “for the good of the people,” your first response should be, “WHICH people?” Don’t kid yourself. It isn’t about YOUR good, if you’re a decent, hardworking, live-and-let-live American. It’s about the good of politicians, their pet interest groups, and any other mobs that have learned how to kowtow for a few favors. There’re an awful lot of squeaky wheels out there screaming for some grease, and getting it.

Ever heard of regular folks creating a PAC to lobby Congress in their own interests? Nope, and you never will. It’s a losing battle, and the thing is, we don’t have enough in common to get militant together. We’re of many different minds about things.

And that’s exactly my point. If we can’t agree pretty clearly as a whole people that something is good (and “the will of the people” is something that doesn’t even exist!), then: a) it probably ISN’T good for many of us, so it isn’t REALLY “for the good of the people”; and b) our government should stay the heck out of it.

It’s that simple. And it would make our Congresspeople’s lives much easier. They could stay home in their districts most of the time, since there wouldn’t be much for them to do. We’d already have the basic laws we really need, and the systems in place to carry them out. We could go back to the way it was when Abraham Lincoln was a Congressman: our “leaders” would only have to work in Washington for a couple of months a year, which is all we’d pay them for, including reasonable expenses, and they could stay in boardinghouses as Honest Abe did.

The rest of the time, they could go home and get real jobs, just like us. Forget the multimillion-buck lobbying firm jobs once they leave office. Provide their own retirement funds. See what it’s like to live the way they tell us to.

Now THAT would be good for the people.

Phoenix triumphant,

Rising anew from searing flames,

Your feathers sleek with light and purity,

What happened to you in there?

We feared you had died.

But no,

You had no time, no thought to spare for dying.

You had to plunge into uncharted caverns

And battle the scathing element

To find your way back to light.

The darkness was hell

Yet irresistibly compelling to your soul.

Not through evil, no,

But through the battle with evil,

Where you learned at last how deeply good you are within.

Against the spear of your intention,

Death and evil were as sand in the wind, melting into dissipation.

Hell was not where you belonged or ever intended to stay.

It was where you burst out, a spirit escaped from captivity.

It was life or death, and you screamed for life,

The metallic tangy taste of blood upon your tongue,

And fought so hard that life came back to you.

Your heart ignited once more,

And Brigid’s fire swept in cleansing ecstasy over your wings.

Phoenix, come land upon my arm,

And lead me to your holy fire.

We’ll care not how the flame paints burns upon our skin,

For skin we’ll shed to rise again,

Revealing beauty of spirit within the bones.

Originally written in 2002. Copyright 2002 Beth Homicz. All rights reserved.

Try Ethiopian food for the fun of it. Wear electric-blue suede boots (me) or a three-inch-long red rhinestone brooch shaped like pouting lips (her). Dare, stretch, savor. Sample any kind of life-succulence, and do it with style.

We were convinced we’d known each other before, somewhere and somehow. Still have no idea re the details. But we each had a lot of what the other needed. She opened me up so I could drop a lot of my inhibitions and primness. She says I taught her a lot about elegance and self-control. (Huh, whadaya know!)

Just got back from spending a long weekend with her in Baltimore. She’d been needing a getaway badly, SO badly. So a chica-weekend it was. Lazy mornings, hat shopping, a reading with my astrologer, fantastic dinners at an elegant Chinese place and in Little Italy, and lots of necessary catching up.

I’ve named my blog ChicaBeth in honor of the memories we’ve built, the gifts and lessons that long, deep friendship – and the Chica approach to life – have brought me. And to remind us of the tons of Mexican food we’ve shared over twenty years!

(Something about the name makes me think, too, of the kind of frenzied hip-shaking boogie she loves to do with abandon. Teehee. Weird, I know, but there it is.)