1. Simple Apology
Actually two things I wrote, or tweeted, yesterday need retraction.
One was a simple, stupid grammar mistake produced by trying to get too much content into too little space. Addressing the world at large, I visualized a typical American nuclear family--three people, three common-to-the-point-of-being-stereotypical glyphosate reactions. Perhaps influenced by the fact that I was retweeting something that had a male-type name attached to it, I addressed the husband rather than the wife in this hypothetical family. That was wrong; it made the tweet sound as if I knew the Twit whose tweet I was sharing, personally, and as if he had a wife with an inflamed digestive tract and a child with autism. I don't know the Twit. I have no idea whether the Twit has ever been married or had children, or is even male in real life--lots of people blur their identities by using a screen name and picture that suggests the opposite sex. The implication that I had that kind of information about the Twit, or would have been the first to publicize it if I had, is incorrect and also, when I think about it, rude.
I apologize for the way this tweet came out:
"
When we do coast to a full stop on #glyphosate ...
Will your hands span your wife's waist again?
Will your #autistic child learn to read?
Will your blood pressure (!) be easier to manage?
How much better will we all feel?
#GlyphosateAwareness
Quote Tweet
David Young
@David__Young__
·
Replying to @GMWatch
this POISON is in nearly every food we eat today! it must be banned, full-stop!
#glyphosate
"
I don't apologize for the questions; I do apologize for failing to address them to something like "Gentle (Married Male) Readers of the World," which was whom I meant them to be addressed to. All I meant to say to or about the Twit known as @David_Young_ was that I agree with what he said.
2. Long Explanation, Part 1: What I Got Wrong
Now the more important retraction...
Someone wanted to get into a "direct message" conversation on Twitter. I hate those. Some conversations with e-friends, especially among people who might be old acquaintances in real life or between writers, reviewers, editors and publishers, do not need to be published to the whole Twittersphere...even so, Twitter's direct message system has never worked very well on any device I've used.
This Twit appeared to be a stranger, and the message request was something about paying off credit card debt. Red flags popped up everywhere. Offers to pay off a stranger's credit card debt in cyberspace are like invitations to go for a ride with a man who has some candy for you, in his car, when you were in primary school. There is a very remote chance that someone has good intentions and doesn't realize that person is sounding exactly like a lot of people with evil intentions, but you start backing away at once.
I told the stranger that I have no credit card debt. Nobody at the Cat Sanctuary has had anything to do with credit cards since 1969, and I'm not the one who found out how un-liberating they were, back then.
On what I've earned by writing online and selling books, handcrafts, and junk in the Friday Market--what, three Fridays this year?--it's not been easy to pay for groceries, electricity, property taxes, and the following personal expenses: one shopping bag of discounted books (to restock my display and sell at a profit), one dress ($2 at a charity store), and six candles (over which I do indoor cooking). It's not been easy, but I have done it. I just might be the only native-born U.S. citizen whose frugality impresses people from India.
I added, "But you can always support Glyphosate Awareness with a postal money order," and gave the address that should appear at the bottom of the screen. This is something any and all Gentle Readers are welcome to do.
I visited the Twit's profile, briefly, and retweeted person's explanation of what person was tweeting about with this answer to the question of what I could do with $10,000:
"
10K would give my bookstore the physical space it's always wanted...and lots of NEW books by LIVING writers. (I don't do loans: no assurance of being able to pay back.)
"
Then I realized that, in that sequence, I was implying that Glyphosate Awareness solicits donations that go into my personal pocket. This is so wrong.
Glyphosate Awareness is not an organization that solicits donations. It's a movement. Any number can play but I don't endorse any attempt to use the movement for profit. We are not out to get rich; we are out to get well, to heal ourselves and our families from glyphosate-related chronic disease conditions. I have disowned and denounced people who've tried to market unproved remedies or solicit money in the name of Glyphosate Awareness, and so I will continue to do.
To the extent that anything I endorse in the name of Glyphosate Awareness would ever ask you for money, it would be the Children's Health Defense Fund as led by Robert F. Kennedy, Junior.
There are legitimate ways money can promote activism. The Glyphosate Awareness movement has not relied on them; my idea of a grassroots movement is one that does not depend on money or connections, that spreads among private people just because a whole lot of diverse individuals who don't even necessarily know each other agree that something is relevant to them. But if you want to think about serious professional-quality lobbying, the Kennedy clan were all born and raised knowing more about how that's done than most of us ever want to learn. That is how RFK-Jr got to be the head of the Fund.
Historically, not only have Republicans admittedly hesitated to bash big corporations, but Democrats who hope to be elected to office have very quietly done just the same. Even other members of the Kennedy clan have scolded RFK-Jr for daring to denounce corporations like Bayer, Lilly, and Merck. Why? Because these corporations donate the maximum legal amount to both major parties and then, when facing anything short of an open-and-shut charge of outright murder, the corporate spokescreeps remind the politicians of "aaall we've done for you," and the politicians usually...well...this web site has published the sort of thing they have to say. We invited a member of Senator Kaine's staff to meet us in a popular cafe and talk to some people about their experiences when I happened to see my whole town react to glyphosate spray vapors. She couldn't fit that into her schedule, but sent us a press release about the Senator's contribution to a successful bill intended to reduce the harm done by "pesticides," generally, several years in the past. That is so typical of mainstream Democrats. The only D politician who's overtly said anything nice about Glyphosate Awareness has been unelectable Bernie Sanders. This is important for D correspondents to know. Yourall's party blames the Republicans for doing this, and then quietly does just the same...
But Glyphosate Awareness is of particularly pressing concern to people of Irish descent, so it's proper and appropriate that those of us who want to support professional-quality lobbying should rally around a Kennedy.
You may have heard the CDF smeared as an "anti-vaccines" group. It's not. It is an anti-protection-for-contaminated-vaccine group, and also an anti-protection-for-other-toxic-chemical-contaminants group. I have received free e-mails from the CDF for more than a year, and sometimes they do sound similar to the pathological anti-vaxxers (because the pathological anti-vaxxers quote the same studies), but they're not. I think we need to take a closer look at the chemical corporations' tactic of trying to smear all criticism by association. This web site, for example, is not anti-vaccine; we're pro-pet, so we urge people to take their pets in for rabies vaccinations, and if an unvaccinated animal were to bite anyone at the Cat Sanctuary we'd rush out for the human vaccination. This web site suggests that we start lumping together material from corporations like Merck, which are known to have continued to use batches of vaccine shown to have been contaminated and hazardous, with material from any lunatic out there who thinks dumping anti-malarial drugs into public water supplies will protect people from coronavirus. Paranoid-schizophrenic disorders are biological and therefore non-partisan.
And so is Glyphosate Awareness. This movement is for Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Independents, and Old-School Hard-Line Soviet Stalinist-Communists if any of them have suffered from glyphosate exposure and would like to stop suffering, too.
Regular readers know my story, and may skip it. Since this post is being shared with new readers I'll repeat my story below...between places where Amazon book links will go in the near future.
2. Long Explanation, Part 2: Autobiography
[Amazon link will go here]
For about thirty years I lived with a sort of chronic low-grade sickness, weakness, vulnerability to every possible infection and adverse reaction to every medication including vitamins, and with constant nagging. Older people who were supposed to know said things like, "There's nothing wrong with you! You just want to stay home from school, not do chores...get attention by sitting out of things! If you'd only try harder," etc. etc. ad nauseaum. The nagging peaked when I had mononucleosis but it neither began nor ended there. It encompassed a lot of things like "If you hadn't gone swimming you wouldn't have that cold" (when I had allergies, not a cold) and "If you hadn't eaten chocolate, I saw you eating chocolate last month, you wouldn't have acne at your age," and worse.
And most of this verbal abuse was actually intended in the most helpful, most sympathetic way. Most of it came from the mother, grandmother, and aunt who shared the celiac gene they'd passed on to me. They talked that way to themselves, too. They, too, always felt that they were doing everything in life backward, in high heels, uphill, and carrying a 50-pound backpack. They were three of the strongest, toughest ladies you'd ever want to meet--or avoid meeting. They trained horses and built houses and had their own businesses while living with disabilities. "Tough as nails," Dad and other veterans of that vintage always said about them, admiringly. So they were and so I am, too, but in addition to being tough as nails I've also had the experience of being healthy. Here I stand to testify: healthy is better.
It was probably a glyphosate spraying episode that brought it unmistakably to everyone's attention: I am a celiac. I had celiac sprue, off and on in the early 1990s; by 1995 it was chronic, and in 1997 I took the plunge, went gluten-free, and never looked back. By 1998 the feeling of not being sick, which I remembered as occasional "high" moods from childhood and youth, had become normal. I had built up a lot of strength just by trying to live normally while being ill. For one thing I found that, when I wasn't reacting to wheat gluten, I could lift more than my own weight. Easily. It felt similar to carrying 20 or 30 pounds while having a celiac reaction. Celiac sprue is a gross, obvious, disgusting symptom but the worst part of it is the debilitating, depressing effect, which is less obvious to everyone else and far more obvious to the patient.
It was too late for the aunt and grandmother, but not too late for Mother, to become healthy too.
This web site mentions a group of young people we call The Nephews. Some of these people are the physical offspring of my natural sister. They all share the celiac trait to varying degrees (and there's a bit of planned ambiguity--heavenforbidandfend this web site should ever accurately identify any living child). It was too late for two of these young people to grow up without permanent neurological damage. Yes, the one whose sight and hearing are obviously impaired was exposed to more vaccines than the one who only had to start wearing glasses to attend grade three. Two more of them were brought up gluten-free, and can read without glasses. They all enjoyed some years of gluten-free healthiness. They are beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, goodhearted kids.
Then in 2009 glyphosate began to be marketed generically, competitively. People were encouraged to use more of this toxic chemical in more dangerous ways, including spraying it directly on foods as a "pre-harvest desiccant" allowing farmers to harvest more of a crop at one time. Suddenly all kinds of foods that were gluten-free started making celiacs sick again. Oats always did--celiacs assumed contamination with wheat was the reason, but when manufacturers made the effort to produce gluten-free oatmeal and oat cereals like Cheerios, they still made us sick. Orange juice was another leading problem food. Corn and all corn products were. Soy products were. Beans were. Nuts were.
This web site, and others, helped apply pressure to food manufacturers to keep a few mass-marketed food products relatively safe for us to eat. Only a few favorite manufacturers, at only a certain level of size and autonomy, responded to that pressure. Not all were able to respond consistently, at that. Between 2015 and 2020, in addition to what grows around the Cat Sanctuary (which is a variety of delicious, nutritious, though mostly unconventional fruits and vegetables), I've basically lived on a rotation among just a few name-brand grocery items. All of which I've had to nag; and in order for my nagging to have done any good I know a lot of other celiacs have been nagging these companies too. All of which have gone on and off the safe list in different seasons. For the benefit of other celiacs, I've corresponded about my list and I'll post it here:
* Riviana rice products--Success, Zatarain's, Mahatma (not all of them during every year)
* Planters Cocktail Peanuts (not dry-roasted, unsalted, or "lightly salted," and forget about the fancy flavors)
* Jif peanut butter
* M&Ms (no, chocolate does not affect my skin, which is lucky because it's become about the only tidy, ready-made thing I can eat in town)
* Bush's beans (but only the kinds packed with only salt and water added)
* Gwaltney chicken products
* Barbara's Puffins cereal
* The "Appalachian Morning" and "Jamaica Me Crazy" coffee sold at my favorite cafe...but not the decaf
And, ironically, soda pop...because the high-fructose corn syrup it contains is so far from being a natural food that, apparently, the glyphosate has been stripped out of it along with any natural nutrients. If citrus-flavored soda pop contained any actual citrus fruit I probably couldn't have used it all these years, but it doesn't and I have.
Milk products have varied so much that, despite surprising lactase persistence, I've not been able to say that any brand of milk, ice cream, or yogurt has even really tried to offer anything I can eat. I've not made an effort to keep any beef or pork product on the list.
I have wanted to keep fruit and vegetable products on the list--I love salad, and my poor little mother will eat her fruit, vegetables, nuts, and honey if they kill her, which they are now in the process of doing. But nobody, even among the allegedly "organic" fruit and vegetable suppliers, has consistently tried to deliver glyphosate-free fruit and veg. All that can be said is that generally fruits and vegetables with very thick outer layers, like pumpkins, melons, and navel oranges, have been less dangerous if all peels are thrown away; orange peel is now poisonous.
Fish and eggs have generally been safe...but that's it, Gentle Readers. That's all. There was a year when even my own fruit in my own orchard absorbed enough glyphosate vapor, after the utility company had sprayed around the power line, that I couldn't eat it without being sick.
I like cooking and trying new foods. My blog buddy, Grandma Bonnie Peters, intended to do that and make recipes a regular feature for this web site. No points for guessing why that never happened. We cooked. We concocted yummy gluten-free things. First we weren't sure why several of these things left us sick afterward, and then GBP was too "old" and ill to care. One year we actually tested a bunch of recipes, and I wrote and sold a cookbook that's been printed under someone else's name...but we never have been able to publish any substantial number of gluten-free vegan recipes, because fruit and vegetables have become unsafe for celiacs to eat.
We became convinced that this is due primarily, if not entirely, to glyphosate.
And then, around the same time that we pinpointed glyphosate as the common factor in our resurgent illness and the declining health of The Nephews...I just happened to spend a day in an open-air market and watch my townsfolk react to glyphosate vapors in the air. No two had identical reactions. Several blamed a virus, and a virus might actually have been in the air, but it was amazing how people who had got up feeling fine all suddenly came down with the virus at the same time--if there was a virus. (When I'm having a celiac reaction I have very little resistance to any airborne virus, and I didn't get the "cold" others got that day.)
It happened that glyphosate was up for review by Trump's Environmental Protection Agency that summer. I read the EPA's glyphosate docket--a batch of documents admittedly submitted by chemical companies. Amazingly, although you have to read between the lines, the chemical companies were unable to deny what I'd seen in the market. Glyphosate does noticeably harm the majority of all lifeforms exposed to it--fish, fowl, insects, quadrupeds, or humans. It does not produce a consistent pattern of reactions because it produces a bewildering range of reactions, of which it's rare to find two identical reactions in a hundred victims. With time and increasing exposure, however, more individuals will show more overlapping reactions. Individuals who don't show visible reactions, themselves, may become sterile or produce stillborn or deformed offspring.
When I started researching glyphosate I remember being wary about reports from Argentina about its causing birth defects in animals. Like most people--and the chemical companies are still banking on this--I thought "It's hardly possible that one chemical can have all those different effects."
Well. The range of complications produced by living with the celiac disease that occurs when people with the celiac trait eat wheat, also, sounds wildly improbable, but it's true.
The life stories of people who've lived with celiac disease sound wildly improbable, but they're true.
And the lab-produced molecule that's making it impossible for celiacs to enjoy living with our trait, without the disease, once more...also sounds wildly improbable. But it's true.
Glyphosate really exists. So does the mind-boggling range of ways it's harming each and all of us.
We all have valid claims for damages from the Monsanto Chemical Corporation, recently purchased by Bayer. And yes, it's true...if your main health concern has been having a leg bitten off by a shark, glyphosate didn't cause that, but glyphosate probably did aggravate the pain you felt. And, since glyphosate affects both cognitive and emotional functions in the human brain, it's not altogether wrong to say that glyphosate may be a factor in divorce too, although the position of this web site is that people of sense and spirit ought to be able to detach and be mindful of their glyphosate reactions so that those reactions won't cause them to seek a divorce. I actually try to use this web site to help people do that.
4. Long Explanation, Part 4: How Glyphosate Awareness Could Actually Use $10,000
In my own name, as a struggling writer and bookseller, I do ask readers of this web site for money. It's simple. If you liked a magazine enough to read it regularly, in the United States you'd pay about $5 per issue. If you like this web site enough to read it regularly, although Blogspot doesn't support "paywall" technology and I don't like the sites that use it, you should send us $5 every so often. In some seasons I've blogged about extreme financial hardships, in some not, but that's not the point. The point is that if you read what people write, you should pay those people or, if they decline payment, you should send money to their favorite charities.
Or you can buy a book: daily book reviews will be returning soon, after the long hiatus caused by my laptop being too old to work with Amazon, and each of those contains instructions for buying books from this web site. Or, if you're in my little town, you can just buy a physical book directly from me.
Or you can commission blog posts about any topic of your choice, at your site or mine. (I've done guest posts, in a detached research-writerly way, about all kinds of things--window shades, washing machines, the wildlife on an island I'll never visit...someone commissioned "Beards, Fashion, and Fiction," which was meant to sound like me, and someone commissioned the series of diaper backpack reviews, which was not.) I'm available for either writing or collaboration on e-books, too, and I have collaborated on full-length books that were printed on real paper.
I could use commissions to put my current stock of books in a nice, spacious, climate-controlled, wheelchair-accessible place where people could sit down and flip through them. They would look lonely in there--just one shelving unit's worth of books that I can haul around to flea markets. I could use commissions to add e-friends's new books to them. People who don't read e-books could read real printed copies of the e-books I've read. I've been working toward that goal for years.
But that's my goal, not the goal of Glyphosate Awareness. Heretofore, Glyphosate Awareness has never asked readers for money. In linking, sharing, summarizing what's been learned about glyphosate and that incredible range of ways it does harm to different people, I want to motivate you to do your own research and activism, in your own way. I want you as a reader to use your money to print your own documents and share them with your own friends, neighbors, elected officials.
I've designed some Glyphosate Awareness swag you can see on Zazzle if you look for it. Don't like it? Design your own. Zazzle is free for anybody to use to design anything. Use your own flower, bird, butterfly or whatever kind of images. Make Glyphosate Awareness postcards, stationery, coffee mugs, T-shirts or napkins that will blow mine away. Most people who use the Internet have better digital cameras than I have and ought to be able to design better Zazzle print-on-demand swag. I'll tweet about it and, if I can scrape up the e-money, I'll even buy it.
Glyphosate Awareness ought to be much bigger and better than any individual's contribution to it, even if that individual created the hashtag, has written the e-book, has hosted the live chat and caught the hate, and can reasonably accept the title of Queen of it. Any random reader of this post might be able to do more on behalf of Glyphosate Awareness than I've done. Go for it, random reader. Glyphosate Awareness is not about me.
I have applied for Awesome Foundation grants, which are for one thousand dollars, to cover specific projects I've wanted to do. Specifically, since Awesome Foundation pages tend to be localized, to cover local targeted mailings. With a little help to cover printing and postage I could've been sending people place-specific mailings about the harm glyphosate is doing in their own business or area, and what they--these chosen business, government, or community leaders--could do about it. At my own expense I've been sending newsletters to people who, when I've met them, have turned out to be mostly great-grandparents who wailed, "Now I know this, but what can I do?" I'd like to be sending information to people who can do what the retirees can't. But so far I've not been awarded an Awesome Foundation grant.
But with $10,000, Glyphosate Awareness could do better than that.
I got into an e-conversation about this yesterday, and I'd like to put this idea Out There.
Glyphosate is excreted from the body fairly quickly after exposure. It's relatively easy to find in nice, clean hair samples, except that, so far, what hair studies seem to be showing is that all of us are exposed to a lot more glyphosate than is good for us, all the time. Glyphosate is also easy to find in urine samples, except, well, ditto.
Celiac sprue produces another kind of samples, which this web site's contract probably forbids us to describe. The celiac reaction consists of bleeding ulcers that form all along the digestive tract from the mouth downward. There are distinct stages to this reaction as gluten (or glyphosate or, presumably, AMPA) proceed through the body; the final stage is the one where visible streaks of bright, fresh, liquid blood appear in the toilet.
If, as Bayer spokesghouls are still trying to claim, glyphosate does not cause this reaction, then Cologuard would show similar levels of glyphosate in that kind of samples when visible blood was present and when it was not.
If, as everyone associated with this web site is now convinced, glyphosate does cause celiac sprue in individuals who have it, then Cologuard samples would show substantially higher levels of glyphosate in when blood was visible than when it was not.
As a gluten-free celiac who has sprue only after exposure to glyphosate vapors and/or consumption of glyphosate-poisoned food, I can feel each stage of a reaction. I would expect other celiacs can, too.
Other laboratories may offer better deals, and legal counsel might direct us to a different one, but a laboratory that's been part of the Glyphosate Awareness chat for a long time offered to test six Cologuard samples for approximately two thousand dollars per celiac.
So, if someone sent us $10,000, which is not something I'm actually expecting, that's what Glyphosate Awareness could do with it: test Cologuard samples for five relatively healthy celiacs.
That would leave positions open for two celiacs who are not close relatives of mine. I'd want to find out more about these individuals than I'd ask anyone to reveal online, or than I'd reveal online.
In cyberspace I am The Celiactivist--out, loud, and proud--partly because neither "Priscilla" nor "King" has anything to do with my individual name. People who know me as an individual know that I don't talk about my medical history or anyone else's, in real life. I tend, and the people who know me well also tend, to avoid people who do talk about their medical history.
My guess would be that most celiacs, even if they also suffer from extroversion, and even if they run on about headaches or rheumatism, have learned that celiac sprue is just too much of a gross-out for most social relationships to bear.
If Glyphosate Awareness were to receive this kind of money, naturally the identity of the celiacs involved would not be revealed unless, and until, it was reported as part of a lawsuit.
Before trial, ongoing lawsuits are another thing it's best not to discuss online.
I'd like to blame the long siege of hot, damp weather for yesterday's two gaffes, and add that at least my brain wasn't so heatstruck as to start spewing inarticulate but probably unprintable words at co-workers in public...but, even in Code Red weather, I do remember not to talk about some things.
Whether anybody picks up this idea, and who they are if they do, will be one of those things.
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