Saving the World One Healthy Lifestyle at a Time

This is my mission statement. What does it mean? To understand, I think you’ll need to look at each component one at a time.

Does the world need saving?

On some level of my consciousness, I have been borderline-obsessed with saving the world for my entire life. I’m really not exaggerating when I say, “my entire life”. I was molested at a daycare when I was 3 1/2 years old and I was made to testify in court about it at that age. So, it is sufficient to say that I realized the world was a messed up place from that time on. I was keenly aware of the problems.

I have suffered from the generational trauma of my family. Fleeing 400 years of imperialist colonial oppression and slavery under the Ottoman Turks in Greece, my great-grandfather came to America and was embroiled in the struggles of a third-world WOP immigrant. My grandfather grew up without a father and learned to be a man through his careers in the US Army, US Navy, and US Coast Guard. As a boy, I heard his stories watching his best friends die right next to him and cleaning the bodies of dead Kamikazi pilots off the deck of his ship. Both sides of my family have horror stories of poverty, rootlessness, and sexual exploitation of children. My experience was not unique, but was part of a legacy.

Going to hell in a hand basket? Depending on who you talk to, we’re already there.

I’ve personally seen a lot of trauma. It wasn’t just the childhood sexual abuse. I was also bullied and bullying, involved in a lot of street violence, beaten up by police, lost my kid brother to war. I watched those two towers come down on 9/11. I lost my shirt in the 2008 financial crisis. I’ve worked for $4.25/hour in the fields and held multiple simultaneous minimum-wage jobs, working 100 hours a week for a pittance. I’ve faced devastating personal health problems.

The problems that I have been watching have never gone away, but have mostly become worse: moral decay, environmental degradation, rampant sexual immorality, violence against children, oppression of racial and ethnic minorities, exploitation of the working class, rural and urban poverty, religious wars, hatred between identity blocks, political polarization.

Each of these in their own way is a health crisis. Individual health crises also abound, whether it is the obesity, diabetes, cancer, addiction, and heart disease in my own family, or the psychological and spiritual disease we’re not talking enough about as a society.

Going to hell in a hand basket? Depending on who you talk to, we’re already there.

How can we save it?

As a young man, this preoccupation with salvation led first to religious inquiry and enthusiasm for new religious movements. I studied diverse scriptures and mythologies and attempted to devise my own religions. Later, I became interested in revolutionary political philosophies. I was briefly a communist, an anarchist, a syndicalist labor organizer, an American constitutionalist, and then a Libertarian. I was involved in the Chicano student movement, animal rights movements, and protests against police brutality.

My observations of the health problems in my own family led me to develop health codes and philosophies around diet and exercise. My brother and I actually came up with a health code that forbid coffee, tea, soda, and even headache medicines. I was straight-edge. I was a vegan. Broad, one-size-fits-all answers gave me something to fight for.

I learned that sometimes the proposed solutions are really just doorways to new problems.

I became enthusiastic about do-it-yourself countercultural movements. I played in punk rock bands and published zines. I also hung out in the hip-hop scene, attempting to breakdance and blossoming as a graffiti writer.

I tried saving the world through vandalism and violence. As a violent anti-racist skinhead, I lived the wet-dream of today’s millennial “antifa” kids: hunting down neo-nazis and beating them up at punk rock shows or in the streets. This idea imploded on itself. When there were no more bad guys to hunt, we caused trouble just for fun or turned on one another.

I tried a lot of ideas for how to ‘fix’ the world’s problems, but many of them were not good ideas. I learned that sometimes the proposed solutions are really just doorways to new problems.

Proactive, positive strategies.

Some ideas were better than others. Art & creative expression. Community organization. Health & fitness practices. These positive and proactive activities helped me feel better, make changes that helped myself and helped others, and inspired others to act.

I became one of the first 100 people in the CrossFit movement and that gave me some hope for changing the culture of eating and physical activity. Cooperation makes us stronger. I got a University education and that gave me some hope for better life skills as well as financial and career opportunities. Education is power.

The idea that hit with the biggest impact was “Livity”: expressing the life-force by living righteously.

I travelled around the world and was exposed to diverse cultures and viewpoints. This shed a lot of light on the problems that are common to all human beings, as well as the potential solutions that various nations and peoples have put forth.

I became involved in the Rastafari movement. Here I found an entire culture of people with an experience like mine: generational trauma, personal trauma, poverty and oppression, victims of physical violence and the “mental slavery” of a society designed to diminish them and crush their souls. Here I also found a culture that had embraced the kinds of solutions I was discovering: art, music, do-it-yourself community-action, healthy eating, physical fitness, family-building.

The idea that hit with the biggest impact was “Livity”: expressing the life-force by living righteously.

Actions speak louder than words

In my first choice of careers, as a filmmaker, I thought that all the power lay in words and communications media. I thought that if I could get the reigns to the power of messages and media, then I could change the way everyone in the world thought and acted. That’s how I’d make things better.

The truth was quite different. When you work in the media, you work for the media. You work for the people who fund the media. The messages are dictated by the finances, not by the means of production. So, just because I had the skills to make my messages, that didn’t mean it was what I got to do. I did whatever the people who were paying the bills said to do.

When I learned to better align my actions to my words and my intentions, I actually started to become a better person.

So, I got fed up with that and decided to try a different career, as a fitness coach. This is where I experienced the impact that one-on-one education and skill development could have. “Each one teach one” as they say. I learned to put my money where my mouth is, even if it wasn’t actually money, but time. I learned to walk the walk.

In walking the walk, I expanded my ideas about physical fitness to include nutrition and lifestyle, not just exercise. Then, I expanded my ideas further to include mental fitness and spiritual fitness as well as physical fitness. I started to work on my philosophy and psychology and my relationship to my creator.

When I learned to better align my actions to my words and my intentions, I actually started to become a better person.

One healthy lifestyle at a time.

Now I believe that the most ethical way to change the world is one person at a time, from the inside out. The “world” and everything in it–our cultures, nations, and institutions–are just the products of our collective action, itself the product of our individual actions and individual intentions. Change the individual actors and you change the collective effects.

I don’t need to tell you that in 2020, this world needs a lot of changing . The problems that I shouted about and fought against in the 90s are all so much worse now. The media that I wanted to use as a tool for positive change is one of the most powerful evil forces in the world today. But the power to change all this doesn’t actually belong to them and their systems of illusions and brainwashing. The power lies inside each of us.

This world is a horror show, but I–in my inner state–can develop a paradise. If I can start to manifest this beatific vision in myself, my home, my family, and my community, then I can redeem and save this horrifying world. That’s the mission.

I want to save the world one healthy lifestyle at a time. I want to change it one person at a time, from the inside out. That’s what I’m about.

So that’s what my mission statement means. I discovered that it wasn’t ethical, or effective, to bash my head against the world, to scream at it and shout at it, to try to tear it down or burn it down, to beat it up, or to manipulate it from the inside out through media or whatever. I discovered that you can only really change the world, permanently and morally, through changing yourself. Being the change, as Gandhi is purported to have said.

This also recognizes that it isn’t ethical for ME to change YOU. You need to change yourself, for yourself and for your own reasons, and in your own way. I’m just here to be a guide, to help you become a better version of yourself, as I have been learning how to do.

I want to save the world one healthy lifestyle at a time. I want to change it one person at a time, from the inside out. That’s what I’m about.