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Please take more than a single day off whenever the urge hits you. Don't burn out. Your observations are nuggets of gold, and I hope you will share them with us for years to come. So pace yourself!!

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Has anyone else noticed that today belongs in a fairy tale, but one that we actually lived through? You know, the age ole script of the demons and monsters overtaking the family, only a year later the skies are nearly clear and everyone can glimpse a sense of home. Here’s what happened, just today!

I can’t remember feeling this hopeful since .... I can’t remember. My wife and I watched President Joe Biden reassure, encourage, and trumpet ALL that has been done in the first 50 days of his administration. But he reminded America that this is a team effort, and it is being led by ... well, by EVERY mask wearing American!

Biden had so much to tout about the coronavirus roll-out, he forget to highlight his signing of the most major economic revival legislation, in our lifetime. And that goes for today's oldest living person! $2.1T dwarfs the $.85T market crash revival, 2009 whimper, that Obama-Biden managed after the “free market” crashed and burned due to deregulation.

To see Schumer and Pelosi today at the signature table together, I’d have thought they were signing autographs for 325 million Americans! In my mind, they then lept to their feet as they clasped and heartily shook hands as people cheered in the background! I felt like their team had just won the World Series, and thiner team is America

These two miraculous events, the Biden signature and address, happened on what most people consider to be the 1 year anniversary of the virus taking hold in America - March 11, 2020. That was when professional sports and entertainment venues and dining venues .... turned out the lights.

Now,I feel the lights are back on, and the sun is bursting through. All at 9PM, March 11, 2021.

3.11.2021

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Thank you! Loved listening to you and Dr. Freeman discuss history tonight. What wonderful rapport you both have! I appreciate you both so much. #brilliantwomen

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What I find most astonishing about Joe Biden, as a man who has suffered unimaginable losses in his lifetime, is his ability to transform the grief that is always with him into positive attitude and action. But we should never think for a minute that he isn't continually living with both grief and joy as his bedfellows. These his life experiences have helped shape him into the empathic, competent, and quite regal statesman he is today.

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Thank you, Heather. You are so dedicated. Rest.

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Lots of gratitude to HCR for her perspective and effort. Feeling good enough today to imagine the future with more hope. Below is not a rant really but a long discussion of problems and solutions that might have been sufficient to write and not send. But then it is fun to reach out and imagine there is a path to follow.

Yesterday I wrote a blurb linking the difficulties we face in getting our politics to work for us in parallel to the profession I know personally, medicine. Several people chimed in with their own personal experiences validating mine. I am aware that a teacher could do the same. A police captain could probably also write something similar. I thought I would continue the thought especially since it is otherwise a quiet day when we are hoping the relief bill gets signed.

In each case there is the influence of money on a professional, a licensed or badged service provider and a bureaucracy that is overseeing the provision of a service that doesn’t lend itself to competition in the way that building a car does where you can easily go to the next sales room to try out the products and make your own personal decisions.

The staffs of these overseers and especially the leadership are overwhelmingly coming from finance backgrounds where they (1) do not hold a license or a badge and (2) they are acculturated to believe that the way to manipulate a situation is through money. I’m trying to break down the situation in the most simplistic way. I am aware (via my loved sister) that it is always “more complicated” but I feel that it is by this process of simplification that solutions can be discussed. After all what is the point of debate and conversation if not to come to solutions? I am aware that we also love to grouse together but I’m not into that so much this morning. Which is why I’m not giving further examples of the problem. How many do we need to accept the problem as truth and move toward a next step?

I am also aware that this is HCR’s venue and not mine. But I have personally enjoyed when others have written about their knowledge base and their views if only tangentially related to HCR’s.

So what is the solution? Remember when younger Bush ?(I think) got into the business of ‘upgrading’ public education? This was done by linking financing to standardized testing and all the experienced teachers threw up their hands predicting exactly the future we are now in, where teaching has become no more than preparation for these tests which they knew would not, could not, equate to actual education? And, where the root problems in public schools haven’t been fixed. Who was it and how did they come to the conclusion that they knew better than all those licensed practicing teachers? Maybe it was a teacher as some of the ‘leaders’ in medicine also hold MD’s and once upon a time did see patients but are now chasing dollars.

Remember when the Japanese car industry started and took Detroit to the cleaners? (I lived outside Detroit at the time.) Remember Demming who tried to sell his management theory to US industry but got turned away so he went to Japan and became a god? He said reduce the layers of management and if you want to run a company well go where the actual work takes place and ask the guys who are actually doing that work what the problems are and how to solve them. Then just do that. These answers have never been complicated. Always it has been that the people in power who have gotten there by manipulating money are still in power and the only thing they think about, care about, know about is money.

Money gets it done. Money solves the problem. It is a BIG LIE. Money is the problem.

Secret money is just plain toxic. Seems like that shouldn’t be difficult to know. But also as long any money runs our leadership we have a problem. Money isn’t even real. It is not a product. True, it has been the vehicle that has developed the world from the Middle Ages to now but now it is time to move on. We didn’t really have health care issues in the Middle Ages or the 1800’s for that matter. We had food and sanitation issues. We didn’t think or see very large back then.

Money changed that. Now we have health care systems and global food distribution. Now we want equality, to preserve the planet, to raise the bar of over all thought and experience. We want to live in a humanitarian world where being inventive and cooperative is the goal and is rewarded. So things have to change again. Where we had war-lords we now have the super-wealthy. Where we had taxed, mud soaked villages we now have slums, gangs, terrorism and clouds of pollution. Where we had swords we now have guns, rockets and money.

So what does it take to unseat the money people and seat humanitarians to do this not as a blip but as a trend? The For The People Act. (Which means reducing the filibuster) and a follow on movement to not just make the money visible in our power structure but to remove it. Campaign finance reform. Taxation reform. And, the recognition of the expertise of the individual doing the work. Not finance but actual work. Perhaps starting with those service disciplines that require licenses. License them and then let them control their own environments.

This requires user controlled database interfacing because like it or not we are in the computer age and big data is here to stay. Ordinary workers doctors, nurses, teachers, need to be able to see the data, search it, decide themselves how to interact with it and what to do with it. Big data can’t be placed solely at the service of profit. Bill Gates gives a lot of money away but he also controls a lot of big data. Judy Faulkner CEO of EPIC the medical record company… not so much giving but a really lot of big data. Google, big data, controlled by big money. Face Book. On and on. Big data is like the new money. It is just as powerful and just as devoid of ethics. But it is also the key to the future beyond money.

All IM not so HO.

Well that was fun. Way too preachy though. Sorry about that. I definitely don't have HCR's style.

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Dear Professor,

Thank you for writing through the weekend! Rest deeply and happy spring. There is nothing like the Atlantic meeting the sky on the coast of Maine. Peace writer.

Your grateful reader

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Have a wonderful evening, Heather. And true that, Spring is coming,in fact already here in California. And tomorrow I go to visit my best friend, first time in a year, to eat fresh oysters (west coast of course) and drink champagne. So very much to celebrate.

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So thankful for you and your wisdom in my life. Sleep well.

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Ahh, those little grey cells of yours need their rest. Meanwhile, here's a look at our President's accomplishments in his first 50 days: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-first-50-days-key-promises-d40e38b8125d1ab2b98661c9ba919238

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It's hard to comprehend that only a year after this horror show began and kept intensifying with criminal help from a morally bankrupt president, something more tangible than hope is taking root? And only 50 days since President Biden took office! Imagine for a moment where we would be if somehow Trump was still in office. On second thought, let's not. Instead, let's bask in what expertise, leadership, and empathy have delivered, thanks to democracy in action.

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After such a moving address by Biden, seems it's possible that we all can sleep a little better. Heather, I hope your rest was a peaceful as the serenity in your photo. And, after Biden's address, "hope" is the word.

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Rest well! I so appreciate your letters and chats and excellent ways of putting the present into context with history! Thank you!

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Please take good care of yourself -- I echo the words of Christopher LeeKeenan -- I'd been concerned about the cost to you of so much hard work, so many late nights preparing your invaluable Letter.

By the way, the photograph you gave us is marvelous. Like all the others you've posted when you were taking a break, but more so.

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I agree with all those other sentiments. What you write is remarkable. I have no idea how you keep it up, so please rest from time to time, watch the sea, breathe the ozone, listen to the birds and watch the early buds of spring swell into leaves.

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Ah, Bless you Heather. Thank you for everything you give and do for the many of us. Wishing you deep, sweet, regenerative sleep:)❤

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