By Michele Ann Mareck, EDC member

I would like to offer a “big picture” comment on the recent very disturbing events in our county – events that reflect “tip of the iceberg” realities in our social fabric. [“For the record,” as they say, I am an elementary school teacher, 68 years old, from a ‘working class,’  ‘multi-racial’ family (European; African-, Native- and Filipino-American).  I have lived and worked in the San Marcos/Escondido area since 1988 and before that in Sonoma and Kern counties for an average of 10 years each.  I was devoted to and greatly enjoyed my work.]

When we tolerate – for whatever reasons – a “healthcare system” that only grudgingly embraces preventative medicine and practices, we are tolerating a hollowed-out version of “community” that does not in reality broadly encourage neighborhood clinics and recreational centers with ready, day-to-day basic ties to the neighborhood schools.  Clinics and recreational centers that pro-actively offer support to all families — whomever and however they are.  Neighborhood communities that are linked pro-actively with their surrounding and more distant neighborhood communities in the exchange and sharing of their knowledge and resources.  Neighborhood communities that can thereby be much more likely to prevent the evolution of the horrific crimes and social sicknesses that so threaten our youth and their families (i.e.: all of us.)

Our national healthcare debate has made most everyone aware that our “system” excludes so many people that the “emergency room syndrome” has been sinking or threatening to sink our hospitals for a long time.  I would suggest – and I’m sure this is occurring/or has occurred to many, many people – that the same problem is overwhelming our families.  And its horrific symptoms are here for us all to suffer.  I, too, find my heart in my throat repeatedly these last weeks, tears welling over and over, calls to my daughters based only upon the most essential desire to hear their voice and somehow to warn them of this illness that afflicts our society.   A sense of community grasps so fully at my consciousness as I share the suffering of my Rancho Bernardo neighbors, and at the same time an undeniable sense of the hugely inadequate reality of real “community” that is our neighborhoods’ condition – wherever and however  they are.

We can “seize the bull by the horns.”  We can take what we know and day-by-day set about to change the greedy, self-serving, arrogant short-sightedness which  keeps  too many of us from actual day-to-day “praying with our feet’:  actual day-to-day developing neighborhoods that are truly “communities” – that embrace their families with all the basic threads that actually, in “real life” make “community” thrive.  This is not pie-in-the- sky idealism.  It is a necessity of healthy, robust survival.

What does it take? A community health nurse and a trained aide in each neighborhood school with a direct link to a near-by clinic to which students and families can be referred for whatever problems may be impacting the students’ progress. (Clinics and related programs can often be easily, efficiently, and effectively located with recreational and/or library centers.) The focus is pro-active and preventative, ranging through basic health problems to those of family dynamics and economic stresses. It reaches out respectfully and collaboratively to families.  And the school curriculum includes health education – as the staple that it once was; a basic ingredient in the student’s growth to responsible and robust civic life.    We know how to do these things.  But we must as a region insist on reliable, modest funding for our communities’ health and education.  Reliable funding. Funding that cannot be co-opted.  Yes – of course — funding that includes capable record-keeping and regular review.  We, the public, must insist on a tax base that assures reliable funding, year-in and year-out for these the most basic ingredients to robust communities. To continue as we are – the events at UCSD, the attacks on our women, and the hugely disproportionate numbers of people in our prisons…– will simply signal a broadening and deepening of an already intolerable situation.