Episode 08: Rise from the Ash’s
Intro - 00:15
Ads - 06:20 - Please visit our sponsors Awakened Vapes, Genesis Pharms, and the Caramel Corn Company and help support this podcast!
Interview - 09:53
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Welcome back to Awakened Exchanges! I’m your host Jay Rich and this is our third Thanksgiving episode for you! This whole month, I’m focusing on people who care for others. People that can show us how to be grateful all year round. We have an extra-special Thanksgiving Day episode planned where I’ll be speaking with Ayanna DeCosta, of Vehicles for change. We also have a Christmas Eve episode that I can’t wait for, but first we’re going to kick off our Holiday podcasts on December 3rd with a very fun conversation with Nick Hinton. He’s about to publish his second book and is going to share some very provocative theories about our perception of the universe. I can’t overstate how excited I am for him and our other December guests!
Since we’re focusing on healthcare for this episode, I want to at least address the Covid nightmare that we’re still enduring at this point. I just want to stress that this isn’t a joking matter. Covid very well could just feel like a minor cold for you, and hopefully for my housemate, but it can also take a serious turn for the worse. I can share the Fort Worth Star Telegram’s report of a 4-year old boy who lost his dad in June. His dad, who was 33, contracted it while training for a new job. And then, four months later, his 29-year-old mother contracted Covid and passed as well. Two young people are gone and now this 4-year-old will never know his parents. I know that wearing a mask seems like a silly thing, but if there’s any chance that it’ll help even slow the spread of this virus until we can get the most vulnerable people in our society vaccinated, then it’s worth the hassle. Both of the new vaccines require being kept frozen and one of which needs -70 celsius, which is not an easy thing to transport or store, especially when you need hundreds of millions of doses. Let’s get our healthcare workers vaccinated, then our elderly, and then we still have to hope that it’s effective for long enough that we can tamp this virus down. Until we’re closer to those goals, I don’t think that wearing a mask is an unreasonable request. Europe is already turning the corner on their rise in infections, and how did they do it? By locking things down again and restricting all of their citizens. Since Americans won’t go for that, maybe we should do some voluntary measures. We had over 180,000 new cases on Friday the 13th alone, and still at more than 165,000 as I write this on the 16th. We were at 30,000 or so per day when everyone was freaked out, but now it’s not a big deal? Of course we all want to get back to normal, but does that mean you should care less about those around you? I definitely don’t think so.
Apparently I found my rant for the week, but now that that’s said, I want to thank Charlotte Ash for joining me this week. She was the Executive Director of the Snake River Community Clinic, in Lewiston, ID for the last 20 years. Her clinic specializes in serving the uninsured and under-insured of southwest Washington and northwest Idaho. Despite her recent retirement, she agreed to step in this week and talk about her personal passion for helping others. She chose to devote the latter part of her career to helping those in need rather than expanding her pocketbook. We’re extremely grateful to have her on our show today.
