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Uniting for a Healthier Future

Helen Schifter has been a vocal advocate of the value of healthy living. She has been passionate about spreading information that will hopefully educate many in society about the need to transition to lives that prize and prioritize their health and wellness over much else. In the current environment we are in, health and wellness unfortunately do not rank in a very prominent way, when it  comes to the totem pole of people’s priorities. 

Helen Schifter is intent on changing this dynamic; in as extreme and dramatic a fashion as possible. In her judgement, our inability to communicate the value of healthy living to our country’s youth; young adults and adolescents, is a severe abdication of responsibility on all of our parts. We owe it to them as the adults that so many of them look up-to with reverence and respect, to seek to inform and enlighten them of the need to reform their daily lifestyles to ensure that health and wellness takes the priority it  deserves. 

Schifter has been adamant about the fact that our generation has thus far truly let our children and grandchildren down by failing to communicate this in as effective a fashion as possible. She believes it  amounts to a dereliction of duty on our parts; and one is of course inclined to agree with her. If one is to look at the obesity epidemic for example, it continues to get worse and worse. And the sad reality is that the problem and situation will only continue exacerbating before it gets even remotely better. 

In order to combat this most effectively, there needs to be a social movement that seeks to put this issue at the forefront of as many people’s minds as humanly possible. That movement can take the form of an influencer campaign or even a lobbying campaign. Though lobbying certainly as a term doesn’t leave a great taste in most people’s mouths, it  can also be used for incredibly constructive purposes and reasons. 

Of these, the ability to ensure that our nation’s youth are preserving their health, would certainly rank as one of the most noble endeavors what could possibly lobby and advocate for whether in a political context or otherwise. In order for there to be a groundswell of support for such an important initiative, there needs to be bipartisan voices on capitol hill and also on a grassroots level encouraging a movement to be spearhead fostering this type of change. 

Without such pressure created for lawmakers, policymakers will never make any changes. Our lawmakers are politicians by profession; and they rely on their constituents’ votes and other expressions of support in order to keep their careers alive and surviving. In order to create an environment where that sort of pressure is felt by lawmakers; they need to see that the activists promoting this important message are coming from a broad swathe of America and aren’t just representative of one single demographic or political viewpoint. For that reason, it  is especially effective to have Republicans, Democrats and Independents together sounding the alarm bells off, of the need for there to be changes instituted on this front. 

Helen Schifter implores community organizers who have a knack and skill for bringing people together around shared values and causes, to seek to forge a unified front in the interest of creating real and lasting change. This type of unity does not merely have to come in the form of a gathering of people with different political persuasions. That too is important for lawmakers to see; but what is equally powerful are the optics of seeing people from all walks of life – races, ethnicities, backgrounds and social strata, uniting for a common cause that has to do with the literal physical preservation of our country’s future. We should care deeply about our children’s’ well being. And if we do, there is not a single more effective or demonstrable way of showing it , than by spearheading such a campaign in an aggressive and strategic manner.