Here's the deal: Humankind scored a few points last year when the EPA agreed to correct its guidelines to discourage the practice of spraying glyphosate directly on food. Overnight, many people who had "become allergic" to several foods were able to eat them again...at least, if we chose the right brands. If we could afford the right brands.
I dared to eat part of a peach in a restaurant. No trouble. I bought name-brand peaches in supermarkets. No trouble. I bought store-brand, specifically "Clover Valley" brand from the Dollar Store, canned peaches. I felt sick in minutes and remained sick until every bit of those peaches had come back up.
However, the corporations that had encouraged farmers to spray glyphosate directly on food are completely evil. They do not learn. They need to have their stock redistributed, by court order, such that 55% of each company belongs to one of the "celiactivists" involved in Glyphosate Awareness. That is probably the only alternative to just having all the decision makers in each company drowned in a vat of glyphosate, which becomes an increasingly appealing idea...This spring, Gate City had particular, specific reasons to be appalled as a new farm supply store opened in competition with the old familiar Tractor Supply Company chain. The new store blatantly advertised itself to Christians with Bible verses on its ad supplements and discounts for church group...and it advertised glyphosate, front and center, on pages five or six of ten-page ad supplements inserted in local newspapers. In order to compete, T.S.C. and local farm supply stores like Broadwater's had to push the poison too.
As a result many people who were feeling better this spring are feeling worse than ever by now. Probably this is temporary. I hope. It's still commonplace, almost every one of the few times I've gone downtown, to hear somebody in any public place saying something like "I don't know why, I just woke up this morning feeling so dizzy I can hardly walk."
Take a stroll around your neighborhood next morning, neighbor, and you'll see why. You'll know who sprayed. That person made you sick, just as if person had dropped some sort of drug in your coffee, or maybe torn a strip off your arm. Under the oldest laws of civilized nations you'd have the right to go into person's house and cut a strip off person, but why would you want to? What good would that do? I'd rather see a law more suitable to modern civilizations whereby you'd have the right to take over person's house and land, and person (the poisoner, the violent criminal) would have the right to live in a basement flat in a filthy apartment project if person survived forty years of hard time.
We at the Cat Sanctuary have a particular problem. What I don't know is whether Bayer, which is known to have paid goons to infest otherwise glyphosate-free neighborhoods and demand a "right to spray," has specifically targeted the Cat Sanctuary, or whether it's just more of a certain person's long career as a Professional Bad Neighbor.
What he is, is a real estate investor with a record of doing particularly vile things with real estate he's acquired. This guy does not go up to people, even if they've advertised property for sale, and say "I'd like to offer a lower price than you advertised for that piece of land." They'd boot him off their porches if he did. So he sneaks around, talking behind the backs of target property owners, sneaking onto their property at night, doing anything he can think of to make people who aren't really attached to their property want to leave it.
Item. A family whom I've previously mentioned here under the screen name "Lopez" sold out after Mr. Lopez was sent to prison for a crime that's much more often mentioned in false accusations than it's actually committed--a crime so despicable that it's usually just mentioned as a general all-purpose insult to any man, with no serious suggestion that he'd actually commit it. I don't know the particulars of the case. I can't say for sure whether Mr. Lopez was framed, but, considering who bought his little farm, I wouldn't be surprised if he were completely innocent, of that crime or any other. Unfortunately his alleged crime is one that gets no sympathy in the prison culture. Mr. Lopez's life is ruined. Maybe he deserves it. Maybe he doesn't. Certainly evil rumors about everyone else in the neighborhood have run about since Mr. Lopez lost his farm; if a person took them seriously that person would have to imagine that what is actually a peaceful, pretty corner of the mountain has been more like an institution for the violently insane. Certainly some of the most honest, honorable, generous, and moral people I know have been accused of everything from burglary to incest.
Item. When Grandma Bonnie Peters' business was floundering, she felt desperate enough to sell some land near mine to a family friend who promised not to sell it. (He was the kind of real estate investor who liked to restore or recreate a lovely traditional house on a piece of land.) The land was not ideal for home building, and many times I heard him say, "You know I never even wanted to buy that land; I'm only holding it for Miss Bonnie." Then some of our neighbors, who had been pleased with the condition of our private road--alarming but not undrivable--before, suddenly decided that the road was too accessible and needed to be made rougher...causing our new neighbor to say things like "The road is too rough for me. Driving in and out is torture with my bad back. I'll never be able to do anything with that land." Then an emergency hospital visit (verified) made him feel desperate, and the Professional Bad Neighbor acquired his acres too.
Item. The contract of sale in this case specifically reserved some use of the said acres for GBP and for me. Those specifically reserved rights were regularly and deliberately violated. The contract did not specify in writing, but the discussion did include, that no "pesticides" were to be sprayed on the land in any circumstances--George Peters having sensitized the entire neighborhood to this issue back around 1970 when a neighbor who was then alive developed Parkinson's Disease. However, more than once I observed and photographed evidence that poison spraying had occurred. Each time the Professional Bad Neighbor offered an unconvincing alternative explanation of how valuable plants had been killed.
Item. Harassment and vandalism at my home began while I was living in the city; my parents noticed early examples of what became regular occurrences after the Professional Bad Neighbor owned two (non-adjacent) tracts of land in the neighborhood. A clear pattern emerged, and includes physical evidence that this individual was to blame. Three distinctive features of this harassment are that (1) any property stolen has been valueless and some property has been left on the ground, as if it had just flown out through a locked door; (2) vandalism takes place at times and in weather when most adults are at home in bed; and (3) when the vandal carried a light, which he usually did not, he consistently left my home crossing a neighbor's woodlot--raising mutual suspicion between that neighbor and me. This is the neighbor to whom I've given the screen name "Young Grouch." Though he and my brother were school friends, though he and I have never actually quarrelled and share an interest in rescuing animals, and though I have even made some efforts to defend his property when it was the target of the vandalism, he has distrusted and avoided me and I've come to dislike and avoid him.
Item. Harassment has specifically included what is known to be this character's trademark--leaving dead animals' bodies in the road, sometimes wrapped in plastic bags, sometimes not. Bodies found on our road have included deer taken out of season (including pregnant females), at least one of my resident possums, and the skeleton of a cat of the peculiar size and shape of our former Queen Cat Heather. Heather, as regular readers may recall, went missing on the night (a) when seven small dogs were abandoned near the Cat Sanctuary, (b) before a record freeze arrived; the pack of dogs gradually shrank while I was looking and calling for Heather. How many dogs the Young Grouch was able to rescue, and how many froze to death, I don't know.
Item. The Young Grouch's property had remained unsold for several generations and was supposed to have been entailed to prevent sale. Nevertheless, earlier this year, he sold two acres to the Professional Bad Neighbor. Those two acres happen to adjoin my property and to have been the property I have most wanted to buy since I was thirteen years old.
Item. The Professional Bad Neighbor has, since buying these two acres, openly boasted that he intends to run all of the original property owners out of the neighborhood. He has specifically mentioned a claim (not very sustainable in our climate) that my home contains FIRE HAZARDS. I have heard this man leading people past my home, sounding as if they were not even keeping to the road, talking about his opinion of the house, and displaying information he could not have acquired legitimately about the damage to the house. Here we had been thinking the roof continued to leak in certain places because it was an old roof...but why would someone who had never been in the house, or talked to anyone living in it, know exactly where those places were?
Item. I have documentation of several claims mentioned and not mentioned here, to which I am the sole witness; but, for technological reasons entire and alone, it's not conclusive documentation.
Item. I "know" the Professional Bad Neighbor in the way residents of small towns know one another; we are not and have never been friends, but have a good deal of information about each other. He is a distant cousin of mine on my father's mother's side, a distant cousin of another neighbor's on that neighbor's mother's side. He is older than I am but rode the same bus to the same school for a couple of years. (He seemed a conceited spoiled brat then, too.) However, the facts that (1) the harassment of my mother and me has been sex-free, and (2) the harasser obviously has much better than average night vision and late-night alertness, as I have, point to a relative of mine--and within that group, the body silhouette and footprints would be pretty conclusive if I hadn't heard the voice. I did not know who had committed the first few acts of vandalism the local police sleepily shrugged off as petty, ten years ago--I know who's been doing it now. I know that, among other things, he may believe he is immune from criminal prosecution because his sister (who was in my classes at school) worked for the FBI while living. I don't know whether he has ever been a registered employee of the federal government.
Item. And so, last May, the Professional Bad Neighbor told a laborer who has worked for several neighbors that he intended to put a trailer house on the two acres near the Cat Sanctuary, and put in a sewer line. I told the laborer that I, for one, intended to oppose any attempt to put in a sewer line on the grounds that it would disturb the Mountain Spring. The laborer, and everyone else I know in real life, had heard a good deal of what I've learned about glyphosate in the last few years--about why his property became a kudzu graveyard, and why his chronic medical issues, which have been recognized as a "disability" although he can still outwork younger men on most days, flare up on certain days. So, the next time I saw him after mentioning the Mountain Spring, he reported that the Professional Bad Neighbor now planned to "clear" the land and run cattle on it, after "cleaning out all the weeds" with glyphosate spray and a bulldozer. He has done a great deal of visible damage to the soil during the summer, and has sprayed poison on the land almost daily.
Item. He has specifically and deliberately killed my one remaining peach tree, which is locally somewhat famous--a feral descendant of a winter-killed Elberta peach tree, which sprouted from seed right on the property line, and has been the source of the small but succulent peaches I've been sharing with friends for years. Most years peach trees do not actually bear fruit in Virginia; the winters are too cold. In years when no other peach tree produced fruit, that one did. In July it was loaded with the fruit everyone was looking forward to. In August it was dead.
So of course I, as much as anyone else, have lost the ground we were starting to gain from the official "discouragement" of spraying glyphosate directly on food. Maybe more than most; most of the idiots still spraying glyphosate don't want to waste it by spraying it every day, nor do they spray poison on peach trees. That's how all of Serena's kittens and one of Silver's kittens have already died, and why two of Silver's three surviving kittens have remained so much smaller than the third (they were all born on the same day). We've all spent a lot of time indoors, feeling besieged. I've lost some blood and quite an astonishing lot of hair, this year, both white and black; what's left can now be described as grey rather than "black lamee" hair, but the difference people notice is how much less hair that is. I've spent the whole summer picking my hairs off my clothes and furniture, by ones. Yes, that's part of the general immune system reaction people have to toxins or even "allergies."
Last week I was not online because I had a real-life odd job to do. Fortunately the job was far enough from recent glyphosate poisoning sites that I was able to do some work when I got there. I was slow, especially on Monday, when I woke up with heart palpitations that refused to settle down even when I went into the "alpha" meditative state, and joked to the employer that anyone but an Irish celiac would have called in sick and spent the day being tested at the hospital. I would not have...well, I might have been physically capable of doing a day's work in my own orchard, but I wouldn't have cared to risk further injury by proving it.
Irish celiacs are, however, tough as nails. The flip side of the chronic sickliness for which our trait first became known is that, when we avoid our kryptonite (wheat gluten, and now glyphosate), the trait is a flippin' superpower. In order to survive the years we live with "celiac disease" we are, have to be, by nature stronger than the average person, and apt to live longer. This summer I've felt about a hundred times worse than I ever felt when I had that silly little coronavirus that's caused so many people so much unnecessary panic, but guess what, for me that's been merely reverse-aging back to the way I felt when I was thirty years younger. Most days I've not been lazy, or even grumpy. The Professional Bad Neighbor has been doing himself more harm than he's been doing me--and he's older. I expect this problem to be short-term. Very short. I saw the fool yesterday, and he already looks like a prematurely "old" sick patient.
At least two of those three neighbors the Professional Bad Neighbor has cheated were big men who might have looked more dangerous than I am. Appearances can be deceptive.
If a democratically elected government were capable of "caring about people" in any way, of course, glyphosate would not be available to the Professional Bad Neighbors of this world to use as a weapon of violence--against disabled veterans, and animals, and my mother and me, both of whom were widows and fatherless, and not a one of whom had done this evil man any harm. If any readers still feel inclined to place any faith in government as a solution to problems, let them learn something from this post. If government existed for the purpose of preventing violent crime, the Professional Bad Neighbor would have been where Mr. Lopez really is, years ago.
Will the corporations really "phase out" glyphosate in a few more years? Hah. Like the way Bayer "pulled Roundup off the market" last year, they will. But the fools who are still buying and handling the stuff are all but guaranteed to be the ones who show the most obvious indications that glyphosate shortened their lives, and--allowing for actual age and natural, pre-glyphosate conditions--they're also likely to die before the rest of us. Glyphosate and all poison sprays are going out of use, faster than the greedheads in the corporations care to admit...like cigarettes, like driving without seat belts, like water-flush toilets, and probably like the Internet, doomed to obsolescence by their own natural unsustainability. The task before us, Gentle Readers, is to speed up the process so that fewer people die.
Some Trump-haters still believe the Biden Administration seriously "cares about the environment." Bosh. Trump had a financial interest in one of the smaller chemical companies, not Bayer; he was all in favor of bashing Bayer but not in favor of actually doing anything about glyphosate, for predictable, venal, tacky reasons that show how incomplete his alleged religious conversion was. Is Biden any better? Is Harris? I see no evidence of that. From here it looks as if this administration is exploiting more Poison Green ideas more than the Trump Administration did, but actually doing, if possible, less to conserve our natural environment. I would love to see evidence that I'm wrong. Just one True Green thing anybody in this administration is doing, Gentle Readers. Just one.
The Public Interest Research Group is on board now. Robert Kennedy is on board. Carey Gillam is on board. Vandana Shiva is on board. Glyphosate Awareness, as a network of individuals and as a movement, is going to dance on the poisoners' graves. Literally? Quite likely, and likely to happen quite soon. Figuratively, collectively, philosophically? Never doubt it.
I've not been online much but I have relished the reportage, the explanatory videos, and the indirectly supportive educational sites I've found online. (I think monarch-butterfly.com is an especially pretty educational site. I'm not sure how many people want to support their work by rearing smaller, more common orange butterflies in classrooms, but they deserve the support.) I've spent a fair bit of time in communication with sponsors and lawyers, myself. Youall have been doing a fine job. You could carry it on without me, no trouble, but since numbers still matter I'll still be active if and whenever I have reliable Internet access again. Or the Internet implodes, which also seems likely, and in the case of which I still have most of my manual typewriters.
Meanwhile here are three things that might be worth trying. (Things I've been doing, so far as the general lack of phone or Internet service has permitted, from home this summer.)
* Talk to local teachers, in places like Virginia where students are being allowed to attend live classes again. See if they can identify patterns of a lot of students missing school, coming in late, becoming ill during the day, making no progress or falling behind with their studies, having more learning or behavior problems, or just feeling tired--all in different ways--all on the same days. See if those "everybody's having a bad day" days coincide with extended glyphosate poisoning incidents (spraying road verges, railroads, or waterways).
* Check traffic statistics in your area. Look for a small but consistent increase in accidents on and near sections of roads that have been sprayed.
* Look for general, statistical information about admissions to hospitals. In areas where it's possible to track patterns of widespread glyphosate spraying, measure the increase, even and especially in what have been reported as possible coronavirus cases, after spraying has been done. Theoretically a COVID-19 emergency is different from a glyphosate reaction: the list of commonly observed glyphosate reaction does not include a sudden rise in fever. However, the most obvious part of an explanation of how glyphosate reactions work is that glyphosate destroys the "friendly bacteria" that are a large part of our immune systems...and from what I've been able to observe, people were more likely to report serious cases of COVID-19 after glyphosate exposure.
Remember how, last year, I reported that The Grouch thought he had COVID and I said "Poison sprayed along the railroad is what you've got"? Tests subsequently showed that he had COVID, after exposure to visitors from New Jersey, and his self-isolation was what protected the rest of our town from getting it too. But his having a serious reaction was anomalous; though not young, he's not obviously "old" or frail, as most people who have serious reactions to COVID are. This is what I'm seeing more of. I would expect that youall will see more of it too, and if you live in an area where COVID has not run its course, you'll want to bear it in mind as you protect yourself and your elders. If you have noticed glyphosate reactions they'll be different from whatever reactions you notice to COVID, but if you notice reactions to COVID they're likely to coincide, overlap, and mutually exacerbate reactions to glyphosate. I don't have anything close to a scientific study of this. Check your newspapers; talk to your friends. Together we can find out the truth.
Young celiacs, especially...hang in and hold on. We are going to win this. You are going to recover your health and develop your superpowers and recover your looks in time to enjoy being young. You probably feel hopeless, rather often, now; I felt hopeless, rather often, when I was young--and I feel intensely angry, rather often, now that I'm no longer young and know that these silly mood swings come from people deliberately and knowingly trying to hurt people like you and me. Ignore the mood swings. They are a symptom, worth mentioning only as a symptom. You have a reasonable reason for reasonable anger, which is that you've been forced to spend what are generally imagined to be "the best years of your life" being sick, and most recently having your lives messed up by a lot of idiotic panic about an alleged disease that's nothing to what you live with all the time--and that reasonable anger feels different than the mood swings do, even to you. If you don't take your mood swings seriously and do something violent, some of you are destined to be the ones of your generation keeping track of who does and does not attend your hundredth birthday parties.
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