Glyphosate Awareness Status Update

A few weeks ago, Yahoo threatened to stop doing free e-mail. I didn't think they'd really be that stupid, free e-mail being the only thing Yahoo's ever been good for, but I spent several days downloading documents I'd stored as Yahoo e-mail. Then I went home and spent a full 70 hours, maybe more, last week, re-processing those documents. I figured that if Yahoo was really stupid enough to stop providing free, reliable, efficient e-mail service I'd lose some things I'd preferred to keep, lose a lot of things I'd just never made the time to delete, and start all over with another service that offers only e-mail. (Gmail comes with Blogspot; I prefer not to publish that e-mail address.)

So I came back online this morning and, yes, it looks as if that's exactly what happened. Yahoo's not opening either this web site's published e-mail address or my personal business e-mail address.

Ho hum...In the 1990s when I learned to use the Internet, people were constantly having to set up new e-mail accounts because even the paid ones were so glitchy and unreliable. That is also why so many people my age or older automatically distrust anything they see online, just because it is online, and no matter how many e-books you've written people still say "So where's the 'real' book?" and so on. Yahoo was the solution to all that was wrong with Compuserve, Juno, Netzero, AOL, Hotmail, and a half-dozen or more others, for about twenty years. Today Yahoo is Being The Problem.

The first half of last week's weather was fantastic. What is so rare as a day in June that feels like a day in May?! All the spring flowers seemed to be in bloom at once. I took just one car trip, from Gate City to Norton, and saw iris, tulip, rose, daffodil, privet, black locust, honeysuckle, violet, buttercup, celandine, and I think even a few cherry blossoms, all on one gorgeous mellow day. Admittedly the different altitudes produce different climate zones but this year I'm still seeing privet petals drop right onto white violets at the Cat Sanctuary. It was one big greenhouse gardener's fantasy come to life, all week long.

The birds don't know what to make of it; the cardinal and the phoebe quarrelled over the Cat Sanctuary for several days before the phoebe retreated to his family's usual space, about a furlong downhill.

(A furlong is a semi-obsolete measure of distance more Americans should use more often. Eight of them make one mile. Five make one kilometer. Thus learning to think in furlongs makes translation much easier, although I personally learned to think in furlongs because the angle of slope on my private road roughly divides into them.)

There was just one little problem with the first half of last week's weather. Some public enemies were out spraying "Spectracide"--apparently more on lawns than on gardens. Local people can recognize these menaces by the regular brown patches, especially along the edges, of their efforts to make natural ground look like Astroturf. Mercy, I wish somebody would just send them a few big mats of Astroturf so they could relax.

If you want to have a flower border without "weeds" in it, anybody who can afford to put gas in a lawn mower can afford a few sacks of mulch. A little pine bark will keep the clover and dandelions from choking out non-native flowers like tulips and petunias.

"Spectracide" is made from dicamba, another Monsanto legacy product that Monsanto hadn't tried to market because they thought it was "worse" than glyphosate. The most obvious symptom of exposure to dicamba is coughing and wheezing. I also noticed myself feeling tired and even faint after spending time outdoors, breathing traces of vapor that had been released into the air at least half a mile away.

The main weed in my not-a-lawn is cinnamon vine, a.k.a. Japanese Yams. I grew up hearing my elders curse these "poisonous weeds" and the Roosevelt Administration's deliberate introduction of them in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Introduced honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is pretty, and cows and goats eat it. Introduced privet (Ligustrum spp.) is pretty and useful, and the cardinals love it. Introduced kudzu is a nuisance, but it was a desperate remedy to a desperate situation, at the time. Cinnamon vine is what one of my great-uncles was at length persuaded to buy, and his children and grandchildren, nephews and great-nieces, have cursed the day ever since. Cinnamon vine has a pleasant scent--it doesn't have showy flowers, but the whole plant and its fruits release a scent--but it will choke out flowers, vegetables, even trees, only not quite as fast as kudzu.

I use it as a meditative anchor for thoughts about non-interference. No matter how warm and fuzzy we may feel about some idea for interfering with what others may choose to do, there are probably good reasons why they're not doing it themselves. If we succeed in pushing our sweet, warm, fuzzy ideas onto other people, those ideas will probably have unintended consequences, and we will probably be blamed for those consequences. Somebody thought cinnamon vine would be a nice idea to sell to my great-uncle, and my whole neighborhood have been unhappy about it for almost ninety years. I think about this, and release any thoughts my brain might be trying to form for the improvement of other people, as I pull up baby cinnamon vines all...summer...long.

Japanese people eat them. My elders told me, accurately, that the cute little "cinnamon'tater" fruits that form on this "many-fruit" vine are inedible. They don't taste nearly as nice as they smell, and you might be able to keep one of them down, if determined enough to swallow it in the first place, but not two. The Japanese let the "cinnamon'taters" drop into the ground and grow into big yamlike roots. They claim that if you peel these tubers thickly enough, cut them up thinly, soak them in vinegar overnight, and cook them thoroughly, the result is digestible and even tastes pretty good, at least to people who have never tried eating a "cinnamon'tater." The Japanese can have all of mine, thanks. In fact, if I knew someone who wanted to sell them in an Asian market in a city, I'd find a place for the tubers to grow and sell them. To me, vinegar has never smelled like a thing that belonged in a kitchen, either.

So I was going out to pick the cinnamon vines. Each day. You can pick all of them out of a section of a lawn or garden in the morning, and come back in the evening and find more to pick out. And as I picked for ten or fifteen minutes, my sinuses would start to clog, my nose would start to run, and then I'd start to feel "the lazies" set in.

Well, you know, "the lazies." When there's nothing wrong, you're not ill or sick or hurt in any noticeable way, you've not done anything strenuous, and you got all the sleep you needed last night, but for no obvious reason it just occurs to you that you would rather lie down and take a nap than do something that is light, useful, and even enjoyable, e.g., shell peas or pick cinnamon vines or read a nice new book someone wants you to review, this affliction is known as "the lazies." It is caused by kidney malfunctions and occasionally becomes fatal, especially for those who nod off while driving.

C.S. Lewis died of "the lazies." One of my grandfathers did. More recently, during a glyphosate reaction, one of Dad's favorite cousins did. When "the lazies" become chronic and are not obviously associated with specific chemical poisons, doctors may prescribe heavy-duty medications or dialysis. Meh. People who have "the lazies" very often don't live very long but it does seem a pleasant way to die. You just lie down for a nice nap, and don't wake up.

Last week I hadn't eaten anything with enough glyphosate residues in it to have made me sick. But all food these days contains some glyphosate residues. Dicamba's other well-known effect is to aggravate glyphosate reactions, so last week I had another one of those.

I was coughing and sneezing and feeling lethargic, and you know how we're all being programmed to think these days. I thought, "Have I got the Dreaded Coronavirus?" Hmm. I didn't have a fever, but I did have a lovely excuse to stay home, puttering in the garden and going through electronic documents. I wouldn't have wanted to be seen coughing and sneezing on the street and scare people.

One morning I heard little cat-sized echos of my own coughs. I looked out. Poor old Sommersburr, the "grandpa" cat Serena adopted last winter, was coughing and wheezing. "Grandpa" is a human word for that kind of relationship; Sommersburr is more than two years older than Serena. With cats and dogs over about age 7, as with humans over about age 50, it's hard to distinguish signs of "age" from signs of ill health, but he is a geriatric cat. I said, "Poor old fellow," and rubbed behind his ears. That was all I could do. He accepted the gesture in the spirit intended. He really was a pet, once--while His Human was alive. Then he wandered slowly away, coughing, and I've not seen him since.

The good news? Bayer has agreed to stop selling glyphosate sprays in the United States--while they stall on those long-overdue payments to those cancer survivors. Lord have mercy. How many new definitions can one corporation give the word "tacky"?

Right. In England, I am not making this up, Bayer is still trying to tell people how "safe" glyphosate is. Glyphosate poisoning is still possible for food grown in other countries and imported to the U.S., and although I've never written to ask the present holder of Mother's many-greats-grandfather's title for any thoughts about the disempowerment of the House of Lords, I can't say I like the thought of Brits being poisoned either. Nor Thais. Nor Colombians. Nor anybody else, except maybe Bayer decision-makers inside a hermetically sealed dungeon.

Glyphosate Awareness is not over, Gentle Readers. But it's entered a new era. We have, to some extent, won in the United States. We have no right to sit in the United States and tell people in other countries what they ought to do. We have to continue supporting our allies in other countries, but only in an indirect, supportive, non-interfering way.

Then on Thursday the storm system moved in...it acted like an Edge of something that was doing a lot of damage somewhere else. It didn't do much damage here, apart from spoiling Friday Market. (Gate City had just exactly enough rain, off and on all morning, to keep people from bringing out anything that needed to be kept dry. If this weather had been deliberately planned out of spite, it couldn't have looked more as if it were.) In fact it cleared up my upper respiratory symptoms quite nicely.I had a pleasant, productive weekend.

Monday came. I sent a text message to the owner of the basement I'm sharing (with someone who uses it on the days I don't). Adayahi called with an update on his health. GBP did not pick up the phone to provide an update on her health. No text message got through.

This morning came. I sent a message to the owner of the basement at 8 a.m. No reply. By 9:30 I was starting to worry... "Can healthy people who are only 65 or 70 years old get the Dreaded Coronavirus?" I took the cell phone further up the hill, where reception is better, and sent the third message. Right away three messages came through in a bunch. Person was doing fine, and had been.

Cell phone company is trying to drum up sales, to recover from the virus panic, by reducing service to "older" cell phones. I don't think they should be allowed to get away with that, Gentle Readers. I think we should keep our "older" phones. Refuse to be sold new ones by that kind of sleazy tactics. If the companies stop working with "older" phones, like mine, which was bought in 2008...well, convenient though cell phones have been, we all lived without'em longer than we lived with'em.

I expect a lot of corporations will do stupid, self-destructive things in a frantic, doomed hope of recovering from the virus panic without reducing the decision-makers' salaries, and I think back to what I learned from Ralph Nader's book and from his Public Interest Research Group, where I did my first real grown-up job. Corporations will take what they can take, where they can take it. If we the customers refuse to give it to them, they'll be reasonable and fair.

My last post here was provoked by some of the things people were saying about what appears to have been an act of bullying that suddenly turned into first-degree murder in Minnesota. The system, one correspondent has since noted, is working. The bullies, whom somebody made the mistake of hiring as police officers, first lost the protection of being employed as police officers. Then they were arrested and charged with murder. That's how it's supposed to go...Well, of course, actually nobody's supposed to be bullying anybody, even if it stops with stupid tricks like refusing to service or maintain a product in the idiotic belief that that will bully people into buying more stuff from you, and never reaches the level of physical blows. But if people do get to the point of choking other people, and one of them dies, society-as-a-whole is supposed to have a system for taking those people off the scene in a way that does not lead to personal retaliation and feuds and all that kind of thing.

Did race even have anything to do with the murder of George Floyd? Would those two goons have done the same thing to a White man if they'd seen a chance? I don't know, and I don't care. The group known at this web site as The Nephews includes at least one blue-eyed blond child of two naturally blond parents, at least one child who looks Black, and at least one child (actually old enough to vote by now) of the basic human color, like me. I have the same auntly feelings about every one of them that I have about the others. I want all violent bullies to be in a place where they will never, ever see The Nephews.

That's what we have an imperfect but workable system for, Gentle Readers. Don't let the virus panic break it down. As we all go back to work, by all means let's make allowances for people who want to work from home or miss work because they're ill, or their parents or children are, or they're afraid someone will be--but let's stand firm on the rules of ethical behavior. People can do the decent thing from whatever level of distance and quarantine they need, while they're alive.

It's the same with glyphosate. Sitting here in Virginia I care about the effects of glyphosate poisoning on a laborer in Bermuda as much as the effects on a laborer in California. I have, however, a right to browbeat elected officials in the United States that I don't have with regard to those in Bermuda.

Some people in the Glyphosate Awareness movement are much more "globally conscious" than I am. Some live in the countries where the battle to get glyphosate banned is still raging. It's their turn to lead the movement.

Some other people in the movement have much more money than I have to spare. It's their turn to support people like Vandana Shiva and Rosemary Mason. I sincerely hope they support those people better than they've done me.

But I'll keep watching, and so I hope will you. To the extent that the system works to reduce wrongdoing, in a democratic republic, it depends on the vigilance of active citizens like us.