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The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published irregularly by Priscilla King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided that all sources of material are credited.
1. THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY, AT LAST
Far too many animals (and people) had to suffer while Bayer/Monsanto were allowed to squall for a theoretical explanation of the most obvious fact about glyphosate: Whatever your reactions to this poison have been, they weren’t identical even to your close relatives’ reactions. If you noticed your reactions before someone steered you to a newsletter or web page that explained them, you probably heard “You’re the only one who’s ever reacted to glyphosate THAT way,” and possibly “Are you SURE it’s glyphosate and not something else? Let’s make you sick another hundred times so we can be SURE!”—and you might even have believed the implication that your reaction was “all in your mind.”
It’s not. At least, it’s not in the part of your mind that’s based directly in your brain. Observing how many of our emotional reactions are actually triggered by intestinal reactions, some researchers have described the findings summarized at this link as evidence that part of our minds really are based in our, well, intestines.
What happens when the “intestinal flora” inside animals, and humans, are unbalanced? A multitude of different things can happen, depending on what the individual’s balance was at the beginning and what’s changed by destroying some of those “flora.” That is how it is, indeed, possible that a poison that doesn’t directly affect any human body process enough to produce one consistent reaction can disrupt the balance of our intestinal flora enough to make us sick in more than a dozen different confirmed ways. That’s why, even if you have one consistent and unmistakable reaction (as celiacs do), you might have other reactions to some glyphosate exposures and not others; it’s why glyphosate may seem to have no effect on one individual, trigger mild allergy reactions in another, upset another’s digestion, lower another’s immunity, make another “sleepy” (with kidney-related narcolepsy), another hyperactive, and yes, if anybody has any kind of slow-growing cancer or susceptibility to cancer, it can really bring out that cancer—in theory any cancer.
I don’t normally hang out with coal miners, but I happened to find a few of them talking about it recently. “I ought to use up the ‘Roundup’ I have, but now that I know it’s going to give me cancer...” These are guys who know how to read, but don’t read if they can avoid it. They trust TV commercials more than they trust web sites. It’s to laugh, or cry...anyway, glyphosate might or might not give any of these men cancer. (Or his wife, children, parents, or the visiting relative from town to whom he gives a bag of vine-ripened poisoned tomatoes.) Glyphosate is probably more likely to kill us in other ways first...but it can promote cancer’s “effort” to kill us, among all those other things, because it doesn’t directly affect anything going on in our own cells. It affects the vegetative lives of all those single-celled organisms that are symbiotic and/or parasitic inside us. And we may not notice that effect at all one day, and it might kill us on another day.
I salute those misleading TV commercials run by sharky ambulance-chasing law firms that probably aren’t offering people their fair share of any class-action suits they’re organizing. If they stop the coal miners poisoning their visiting relatives from town, all to the good!
2. ST. LOUIS: THE BATTLE BEGINS
We need to keep building awareness in St. Louis that Bayer could actually survive, and even grow—providing more and better jobs for Missourians—IF Bayer can break away from the bad old idea of spraying poisons over the land, and move forward into twenty-first-century ways to control “pest” species. Think nanotechnology! Think robots! Bayer could be building robot wasps that kill mosquitoes, not to mention robot edge steamers that kill weeds growing into roads by watering native plants in their proper place, and robot cutworms that clean weeds out of wheat fields. They have the money. They can train and pay the scientists. They can assign Missouri laborers to safer, healthier jobs!
Present at the trial and photographed for public identification was Hugh Grant, the Monsanto decision maker blamed for the original marketing of this poison. Have you ever seen an easier face to hate? Call Central Casting, ask for an evil-looking face; that’s what you’d get.
3. RUSS JENSEN’S GLYPHOSATE AWARENESS PAPER.LI
I can’t blame the Twit known as Russ Jensen for publishing a Paper.li; I was tempted by that venue myself—but I don’t like it.
For one thing, although a Paper.li circulates in the name of some individual or other, individuals don’t actually produce or edit it. Those links are put in by the Paper.li staff (or maybe only their computers) in Liechtenstein. Knowing that e-friends’ “Papers” are actually assembled by bots makes it easier to waste no time reading them.
For another thing...Russ Jensen’s purpose is to market dietary supplement pills. Obviously glyphosate reactions do use up certain nutrients our bodies need, but hello? Supplement pills have to be digested by the parts of our body that are being destroyed by glyphosate, that are passing ordinary food through, churning it up with blood and froth, but not breaking it down? Swallowing supplement pills during a glyphosate reaction guarantees very expensive toilet water and offers us the hope of raising very healthy sewer animals. The pills may or may not dissolve into powder before they land in the toilet, but they’re unlikely to be absorbed into our blood.
There will be a time, eventually, when our bodies are able to absorb nutrients of which glyphosate reactions have depleted us. When that time comes, Russ Jensen’s supplements may help some people, perhaps many people. They are unlikely to help anyone very much now.
I think Russ Jensen probably means well, but there’s no way Glyphosate Awareness can endorse his “Paper.” I wish he’d give it a different name.
4. AUSTRIA, THAILAND, CALIFORNIA: THIRD VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST
Austria, the scene of The Sound of Music, has seen the light and declared a ban on glyphosate. Like so many other places, they’re now being told they won’t be able to enforce the ban. Thailand, likewise. In the U.K. the bans are being declared, but then declared unenforceable, city by city. I’ve lost track.
What’s to be learned? Governments do have some legal right to tell the greedheads who want to continue spraying glyphosate that they’re committing Reckless Endangerment and are subject to fines, prison terms—and personally I’d have no problem with hangings, either. But they don’t have the fortitude to do that on their own. Governments depend on the consent of the governed, whether or not they’re subject to constitutions that include those words. They don’t dare interfere with market forces, whether or not they officially claim to have or want free markets. That’s why, although looking to government for big, fast, symbolic help may appeal to some of us, it’s not enough. All birds need right wings as well as left wings to fly.
We can blame Prez Trump for telling Thailand that they’ll bloodywell (and we do mean bloody well) swallow the poisons U.S. factories spew out, and like’m, if they want exemption from Trump’s tariff. Knowing that the fact that literate people like us despise Trump has consistently been Trump’s, well, trump card, we can despise him as loudly and publicly as we want. Trump won’t care, because he’s been casting himself as a victim of our elitist bigotry since he was half-grown; his supporters won’t care, because they blame everything Obama and the Bushes got wrong on people like us and our elitist bigotry; and we’ll look silly or partisan if, to our denunciations of Trump, we don’t add denunciations of President Obama, on whose watch the dumping of glyphosate directly onto grains, nuts, and beans, between picking and selling, began. And there’s no need to make ourselves look even worse by denying that the fact that we read things printed in English makes us, to some extent, part of an elite class. It does. We are. Deal with it. (And it behooves us to consider that Trump is an old man, and his attitude in that photo is typical of a kind of senile stubbornness that goes with a glyphosate-aggravated mental decline. Instead of saying “Bad, nasty, ugly Trump,” we might try “Poor old Trump, God help him.”)
Some of us have been told that market forces are as huge and uncontrollable as governments. Technically that’s true; if people who hear us say that glyphosate is harmful to them, too, were finding that it’s good for them, we’d have no chance to take control of market forces. But since in fact glyphosate is harmful to everyone, in one or a few of fifteen (or fifty, or hundreds if we count each kind of cancer and each infection separately) different ways...we have information that others can easily prove for themselves, and we own market forces. We’re already in the saddles of horses that are already moving. We need to grab the reins.
4. TWITTER, WHY WE MUST MOVE BEYOND
Twitter denies that anyone’s interfering with the Glyphosate Awareness chat. Hah. The numbers speak. But seriously, Gentle Readers...on Twitter we’ve won already. There is no intelligent debate left. There are a few diehard glyphosate apologists, looking bigger fools by the minute, and a few saboteurs—oh yes I do notice when and where Twitter fouls up—trying to keep us from discussing what youall are showing me we hardly need to discuss any more, not among ourselves, not when (as Twitter tries to make the case these days) we’re having our tweets show up only for one another. The chat’s archives are valuable; the chat is becoming repetitious, redundant, and boring.
Right. We, the global elite class who are fluent enough in English (and in some cases French) to read and write the versions of those languages used on Twitter, know glyphosate is bad. Most of humankind don’t have computers and Internet access and fluency in the key international languages.
We need to stay connected; for that Twitter will help. But in order to guide market forces we need to think of ourselves as...oh, why not teachers, just to avoid the baggage associated with missionaries or military leaders. Each of us is now a teacher. We need to go out into the real world and organize our students, most of whom still don’t use computers and never will.
Do you like my Zazzle postcards? Can you do better ones? (I hope so, because Zazzle’s not really compatible with Firefox. I wanted to do a postcard for each state, but my 2009 laptop whined, “No waaay.”)
You can paste your own hometown winter scenes into postcards, too. And there’s no particular need to limit yourselves to winter holiday postcards. Zazzle pays commissions on sales but Glyphosate Awareness is not a business for profit. You don’t have to limit yourselves to Zazzle.
We need to be talking to people in the real world, face to face, by phone, in holiday card and gift exchanges. Our Tweeps already know glyphosate is bad. Some days I can tell that Twitter is blocking or delaying tweets from the Glyphosate Awareness chat, some days that it’s not...but Twitter is not a battlefield any more. On Twitter it’s (almost) all over but the shouting. We have to raise awareness among people who don’t do Twitter.
More news will break, and I’ll continue to read and share it on Twitter; some of you are doing superb jobs of writing and illustrating it on these beautiful web pages. But we need to be reaching those of our elected officials who either don’t have Twitter accounts, or have Twitter accounts that are sporadically managed by college students. (Postcards are ideal if you’re not going to bump into them in your favorite café.) We need to be reaching those of our relatives who appear to think the computers we got them for Christmas are a new sort of expensive but fashionable-looking place mats. We need to be reaching the spiteful old hags who’ve been promoted to “manager” or “head” of the basically student-labor-type jobs they’ve spent their whole lives doing, and the cab drivers who have advanced degrees but have lost jobs and work authorizations because they don’t speak better English, and, yes, the coal miners.
More printouts will help. Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t writers should keep thinking...a lot of these people don’t read. They know how to read, technically, but they read only when they have to. Bigger print may or may not help. I won’t be able to appreciate some of the other ideas that may work for your people—but we need those, too. Make videos. Build floats and enter parades. Do pre-game shows. Whatever.
Meanwhile, we need to be working on a positive answer to the glyphosate apologists’ one (feeble) argument, “But how else are we going to feed people?” We have the proof that feeding them poisoned food is not going to create a planet with ten billion healthy humans on it. We need to give them visible, tangible, tasty evidence that it’s possible to raise food that is fit for human consumption, enough for eight billion humans who are committed to getting back to two billion, or fewer, in the next generation, to eat.
For many of us that means learning to use and appreciate undervalued foods like chickweed and dandelions. For as many of us as possible, it means raising healthy, glyphosate-free foods—like corn, beans, potatoes and tomatoes—in back yards, window boxes, kitchens. Almost anyone can rear half a dozen tomato plants in half a dozen five-gallon buckets, indoors, and half a dozen plants will meet most households’ tomato needs. Beans are dead easy to raise, too, and good for the soil. Potatoes are easy to raise, and all right-minded children love picking them out of the loose, mulchy garden. When the corporate shills wail about the needs of agriculture, we need to tell them to get their lazy greedhead selves out of the way of people who can feed themselves better than the factory farms ever did or ever will...and the best way to get the point across to them is to hold up a garden fork loaded with potatoes.
The next Newsletter will come out in a New Year. May it be happy and glyphosate-free.
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