This year 2050 I am turning 99 years old and it has been a wonderful, wonderful life. I am so grateful that I got to be me this time around. As one old friend told me, I’m glad SOMEBODY is you!
I look back on all the things I participated in with the main goal of making things better for people and other animals, A few things float to the surface of which I am most proud.
Because I was blessed with a superlative set of parents, and a good intellence quotient (156 in high school, same as my brother John) I always felt that my responsibility for fixing things should match my ability to respond. I love that verse in Leonard Cohen‘s opus HALLELUJAH that says “ I did my best, It wasn’t much… I told the truth I never came to fool you. and even though it all went wrong, I stand before the Lord of song with nothing on my mouth, but hallelujah!.🙏🏼”
All the way I lived for truth, and truth has always been my friend.
My intentions were always of the kindest, even though it was not always apparent. I learned that sometimes you don’t help people by helping them; sometimes you help them more by NOT “helping” them.
When I would say my prayers at night, at age 6 or five, I would always end with, “ and please help all the poor people in the world to be rich”. What I meant by this was for all people to have a safe, warm dry home with loved ones and enough to eat. My chosen-sister Lauryn and I were able to start a foundation called World Family, which rehomed 850 orphans from orphanages in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, and in many cases these children have grown up to be world citizens involved in this work of healing the planet.
My parents were some of the smartest, kindest, hard-working people anyone has ever met. From them, I absorbed incalculable lessons on how to navigate life with humor and music, and above all kindness. Generosity. “Have two share one”.
Both of my parents were from humble backgrounds in southern Indiana. My father joined the military, “ to make the world a better place.” Mother became a physician before it was common for women to do that. In fact, she was the youngest person and the first woman to graduate from Indiana University school of medicine in December of 1942. Most of the men were off at war so Indiana University started accepting women into a six-year program right out of high school instead of the normal eight years so my mother became the youngest graduated MD and the first woman. Her own father was a physician who never practiced, but became a farmer instead and his mother, my great grandmother, had been a “yarb doctor”, a healer who worked with herbs. So these are my models and inspiration. People whose lives were dedicated to improving the plight of other humans.
I studied medicine and worked in refugee camps and disasters and orphanages, realizing soon after medical school that people do not need doctors and hospitals as much as they need food and peace. Education, clean water and environment are also crucial, so I went back to school to study public health. I wanted to prevent people from becoming orphans and refugees and to rebuild and recover from disasters. When I founded the World Family Foundation to provide medical and educational opportunities to children in Cambodia, and later other needy places, I jumped on the UNICEF bandwagon, educating girls and women, a huge basic need in the world. When you educate a woman, you educate a family, and so many girls 50 years ago were not able to attend school and many women were unable to read and write the language that they spoke every day. Adult literacy were a cornerstone of Cambodia World Family. Girls who are educated begin families later and can space their children helping all to be more prosperous.
I founded the IMMHABI in Cambodia with a grant from the Rex foundation of the Grateful Dead band, thanks to Mountain Girl. This international Medical Marijuana, Hempand Bamboo Iitiative was active and successful, getting cannabis hemp and timber bamboo planted in every habitat conducive. This prevented countless old-growth and other valuable trees from being destroyed, allowing for the restoration of the native and cultivated forests all over the world. specially the boreal forests of the northern hemisphere which could again emit bio-turpenes, and patch the hole in the ozone layer and reverse global warming.
Of necessity to combat climate change, the world began to wean itself off of polluting fossil fuels and develop alternatives, and live by the edict “reduce, re-use, repurpose, and recycle.”
Thanks to GREENPEACE cofounded by Canadian Michael Bailey, human beings have successfully removed all Marine Debris, which prior to GREENPEACE’’s “ drift -net ban” continued to kill animals and destroy coral reefs and would have killed forever if not Stopped. We stopped this degradation! Celebrate!
On the health front governments, national and local became committed to public health and preventive medicine, educating the public about healthy living and eating, and organic food production.
Luckily for the world, Marianne Williamson was elected President of the United States and things kept getting better from there. The drug war ended and people could return to health-promoting plant medicines. And Suzanne Taylor continued her lifelong quest to get people thinking and committed to doing right things to shift the world toward a sustainable future. Amen🙏🏼❤️
I got to be the “Senior Physician Consultant to the AIDS initiative in the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the public hospitals In 1985. When AIDS was just rearing its ugly head and sweeping through various populations at risk. I spread the gospel of HIV prevention, and convened government-level meetings in Laos, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka.
I wanted to be a veterinarian from early childhood, since I like most animals better than most people, most of the time, but I got an early acceptance to medical school at the University of Hawaii, and I decided to take it since it would allow me to be home in Honolulu. I didn’t enjoy medical school, but I realized it would allow me to make a difference in godforsaken hell holes and my first job out of internship was working as a physician on the Thai Cambodian border. Since I did not have a real job to come home to like all the other volunteers, I stayed on and ended up coordinating healthcare in all of the 20 camps housing 500,000 “displaced persons” along Thailand’s borders.
I banned smoking cigarettes and baby bottles (a death sentence for babies in the heat and dirt of refugee camps) in all the refugee camps in Thailand. I developed a passion for helping empower orphans and refugees to not only survive but to become allies in this work of healing the world.
I never made much money practicing as a physician, because my parents worked so hard and invested well, and lived so frugally I could choose my jobs based on how much good I could do rather than how much money I could make. It’s too late for me to send this to my son who turned 22 today but I hope he will always be proud of me and what I tried to do to help the world be a better place. I was 50 when he was born and in 50 years, he’ll be as old as I am today, 72. Eli, I hope we get to overlap for a lot of years in our current incarnations, and may all beings be happy and blessed and free of suffering. Amen. In the name of Lord Jesus, who is probably a student of Lord Buddha, who was born a devotee of Lord Shiva, amen. And amen. 🙏🏼💕🌈
I realize this opus will never be finished, but it was a good starting point and jumping off point and Suzanne, thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of all beings. 🙏🏼🌈❤️
It’s almost midnight in california and the deadline approaches. Like the Earth hovering so close to Midnight. In the darkest hour we can perceive and nurture and celebrate the barest glimmer of hope. May it guide us into a brighter future.🙏🏼
I would like to invite everyone participating in Suzanne‘s “world—healing-essay” contest to attend the celebration party on January 1, 2050 when we will all be 50 years older than we are today, and older than many of our framily (family of friends) some of whom will have been with the angels since many years earlier.
I have long suspected that Suzanne (as many of us have long suspected) attained mastery over the mystery of aging and death, very subtly and very gracefully while almost nobody noticed (except everyone secretly wondered about in their unconscious). I revealed the trumor (true rumor) that ithis is due to her association with divine masters such as Wowza and Pennell and Emerald Starr and Yours Truly, Yours Treely, your occasionally humble servant, moi.
So anyway, let’s all gather at Suzanne‘s house and paint that portion of Hollywood Hills red, or rainbow, or all of the above, in honor of us having won this essay contest, hands-down and hair off.
Kaniela Campbell is actually Daniel Campbell Susott in Hawaiian. I celebrate Suzanne Taylor in my music: truth and beauty, Singing Truth to Power.
Solar, wind, OTEC are being made more efficient by global warming, so there will be no more “climate refugees” and global warming has been reversed.
. While playing doctor and being a lover of animals, I have been blessed to help protect and restore watershed forests from Appalachia to the Amazon to Asia to my backyard here in Honolulu, inside the Gaiasphere , a giant living basket – a bio-basket – grown and woven of holy trees, giant timber bamboo, and Marine debris, covered by sacred and medicinal vines! 🙏🏼
A stream flows through again after the dry years following the clear-cutting of the native forest, harboring native O’opu fish. Protecting cores of biodiversity, pristine habitats that could expand and connect and harbor vanishing and recovering plants and animals, replanting and replenishing what is endangered and recovering. .
Marine debris – nets and ropes which are made to last forever: if not removed from the ocean, will kill forever. This makes a beautiful forest temple makes a beautiful, spherical, spheres within spheres, infinitely expandable and infinitely reduce-able down to germ plasm, and Ideas.
Fish stocks are getting replenished, plant-based diets support the world’s population more so than factory-farming meat animals ever could, without cruelty.
See you in 50 years I hope!
Love , daniel