E-Mail to Thomas Moriarty

"Moms Across America" has used this week to barrage Thomas Moriarty of the Environmental Protection Administration with e-mail. I think I'd rather not share his e-mail address here. Those Gentle Readers who aren't already on the Twitter or e-mail list should be prepared to stand with the Moms, even though a lot of them are left-wingnuts and some of the petitions they circulate are consequently silly. Also, I imagine Mr. Moriarty and his office staff are getting a high volume of e-mail this week and will be more likely to read your e-mails if you wait till next week...just as long as you e-mail them then. Here's what I just sent him. (Like all activists, I address letters to people in the expectation that the letters will actually be read by several other people.) I've made a few small changes: I've upgraded the formatting to eliminate words in all capitals, and changed sentences that some of you might recognize as identifying individuals.

"
Dear Mr. Moriarty:

You're probably receiving a lot of e-mails from "Moms" describing their children's known or suspected reactions to glyphosate. This one is a bit different. I'm an aunt not a mother. Although some children I love share the Irish-American celiac gene that produces a very specific (and disgusting) reaction when I'm exposed to glyphosate, and I'm doing this for their sake, I am The Celiactivist. I host a Twitter chat/hashtag that's collected literally reams of documents about how glyphosate really may be to blame for almost any symptoms anyone's developed since 2009, and why most people I know are feeling more than ten years "older" than they were in 2009 (it's especially noticeable if their current age is 15).

I know this information is pouring in. I'm the one who spends Tuesdays documenting that fact. Go to twitter.com, search for the hashtag #GlyphosateAwareness, scroll down, feel free to ignore the banter, and click on the links. People have really done an awesome job of linking to real scientific studies, a few flawed, most important. We began with EPA's very own glyphosate dossier when I noticed what the Monsanto lobbyists who submitted those documents wanted people to overlook: In every study, of any animal species or hospital patient group, each individual's reaction to glyphosate can easily seem both rare and insignificant. Yet these reactions recur, across all species that can display the reaction in question (it's hard to document memory loss in fish)--and the majority of all living creatures do show adverse reactions.

Full-blown celiac sprue used to develop in about 1 out of 10,000 people of Irish descent, 1 out of 100,000 other Europeans, and virtually no one anywhere else. Now pseudo-celiac reactions are global and things that resemble celiac sprue are appearing in people who don't even have the celiac gene, in pets, livestock, wildlife, birds, fish, and even insects. While Monsanto shills scream about how theoretically unlikely they think this is, Bayer refuses to fund medical studies that might confirm or disprove what celiacs have confirmed for ourselves--that we react to glyphosate the same way we react to wheat gluten, only much more intensely. This could be done with a simple blood test. I've been offering healthy celiac blood for months now; so far nobody's volunteered to study it.

As a celiac I'm accustomed to feeling like an alien here on Wheat Planet, but glyphosate is actually bringing non-celiacs together with celiacs again. Typically their symptoms are much more subtle and are easily dismissed as "just a flare-up of something you have anyway," and if no chronic disease can be blamed, everybody has an age or gender that can be blamed. Also by now everyone seems to have some sort of allergies.

My best friend is disabled by chronic Lyme Disease. Guess when it flares up.

A child's diagnosis of astigmatism and hearing loss has been downgraded to autism since she moved to an area with a higher level of glyphosate exposure. (She does not lack empathy. That's why she's so shy, especially when her disabilities became worse than they'd been.)

A neighbor employs someone who's "gluten-sensitive"; most days she's merely quiet, but after glyphosate exposure she's routinely threatened with unemployment for surliness and incompetence.

I'll stop with three examples but I've observed hundreds. If you sat down and made a list of people you know, you'd probably be surprised by how many of them have "bad days" and how many of those "bad days" coincide...I was.

We've all been told that Bayer-Monsanto was told that this administration had "got their backs." I'm actually a fiscal conservative who likes to see people get rich, and I'd like to see Bayer stay rich enough to pay the damages it owes us...but could you clarify this a bit? Protect Bayer from violent hate (believe it or not I try to encourage people on Twitter to focus on collecting compensation) on condition that they stop producing "pesticides," support a total ban on glyphosate, and support a phase-out of poison sprays. How can a company that's connected with Bill Gates not take the lead in moving toward robot technology?

After all, the First Lady's unpublicized medical condition and the First Child's ability to learn are among many things that are likely to be helped by a total glyphosate ban.

Sincerely,

Priscilla King
"

Some of you Gentle Readers can write better e-mails than that. Please do.