Some Things I Have Believed, But Found Out Weren't True

The Long And Short Reviews question for this week is about things reviewers once believed, but have found out weren't true. Short list:

1. Up into the 1980s I believed that gun bans would have to reduce the incidence of gun violence. I lived in a city that had a gun ban in the 1980s and 1990s. I saw firsthand that gun violence increases in correlation with two types of drugs, and that gun bans do not reduce the incidence of gun violence. Even if a gun ban forces one person to choose a different weapon, it brings in armed criminals who want to be able to kill unarmed victims. The United States should be extremely wary of countries whose people spout nonsense about our needing gun bans. These are enemy countries.

I came to believe, based on the actual history of Washington DC as "the nation's murder capital," that violence generally increases in proportion to the use of drugs that fall into one of two categories. One category is "illegal drugs" that are distributed by criminals, who form competing gangs and settle their disputes by violence. The other category is "mood-boosting drugs" that can produce a mental disorder that involved (1) awareness of pain caused by reactions to the drugs, (2) association of this pain with incidents of horrific violence or pain in the past, and (3) a desire to kill others who are blamed for causing the pain and/or whom the patient wants to spare from the pain, then kill oneself. While dangerous illegal drugs may be a self-limiting disease in a neighborhood (eventually users sober up or die, or in some cases they recognize specific drugs like LSD and PCP as just too dangerous), mood-boosting drugs are often prescribed recklessly for anyone who seems "depressed." Violence associated with either type of drug is not less likely to occur, nor is it less likely to be fatal, if the violent lack access to firearms. The alternatives they choose, as when a "depressed" bus driver smashed a fully loaded tour bus into a wall in Jerusalem, may kill or injure more people than firearms. The way to reduce violence is to reduce use of either of these kinds of drugs. 

The Lilly Pharmaceutical Company hates me for having noticed this. Lilly has deliberately pressured news media not to mention the role of "Prozac Dementia" in homicide-suicides for about 25 years.

2. I used to believe the Veterans Administration was committed to their original policy of giving all veterans better retirement benefits than the ordinary Social Security pension, specifically including the right of veterans to pay family members who provide them home health care. During my father's lifetime, this was true. I learned, early in the history of this web site, that it is no longer true. In fact the VA has tried to evade its responsibility to provide medical care and pensions for disabled veterans "who are old enough to qualify for Social Security." The superior retirement benefits traditionally offered to veterans, of course, played a large role in many younger people's being veterans.

Why are women attracted to veterans? For me it's nothing to do with the uniforms or "military styles" most of them quickly reject after leaving the Service, and it's not the hint of violence (I see all males as violence-prone) or any sentimentality about their service being heroic (Dad always taught us that some veterans had been heroic and some had been vile). My husband was not a veteran. The man to whom I referred online as my Significant Other was one. His service record did happen to be extraordinary; so did his medical record, and so did his business career. I liked him because, when we met, I said I was looking for more odd jobs. He said, "I can get you jobs--if you want to work in construction." It was a dare; I said, "You're on." So we worked as a team, found we had synergy, and, as people who work in synergy usually do, soon started talking about love and marriage. It occurs to me now that that's the only way I ever have been able to take a man seriously. The ones who expect anyone to care about their physical feelings, alone, are a bad joke. A man who becomes a real friend and working partner can be loved. In any case: if his foster son had chosen to stop taking care of my Significant Other when he was ill, as any normal lad his age would have done, I would have been out there in seconds; but among my Significant Other's extraordinary accomplishments was having reared a faithful foster son. Considering the logistics (both of them were over six feet tall) I could only give thanks. The foster son was not concerned about whether the VA paid his allowance or not. Nor was I. But there's no denying that disabled people get better care when the people who help them are receiving enough money to live on..

3. I used to believe that a vegan meal is a safe, healthy way to flush out the toxins the body has absorbed from a meat-based meal. I still believe that it can be, and I still find vegan meals tasty and satisfying. Not the overpriced fake meat products, but a meal of plain good fruit, vegetables, nuts, or grains. And I still give thanks for people like Mary McDougall who compiled whole books of vegan recipes that will bring the carnivores sidling around to the vegan table, and people like our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters (that was her screen name, she wasn't my grandmother) who have taught classes of people how to prepare the vegan dishes that will bring the carnivores around. 

I used to believe, too, that the reason why people didn't eat more fruit and vegetables was prejudice, or the result of those outdated cooking techniques children hate. I used not to realize the extent to which "pesticide" contamination causes plant-based foods to make people ill. 

4. I used to believe that, although cousins are not necessarily more congenial than any random group of people are, my cousins had all absorbed the same teachings about loyalty and solidarity being our family's real strength that I absorbed as a child. For the majority of the two thousand or so living people who are, in Virginia, legally related to me (up to third cousins once removed), I don't remember ever feeling any special admiration or affection. They were simply relatives, owed a certain level of loyalty because relatives, whether or not any more personal feeling ever developed and even if that feeling was unfavorable. Among the cousins we saw enough of to form any feelings about at all, there was a fat peevish girl who didn't appreciate my kindness to her, when we were kids, and a whiny smaller boy my brother got into considerable trouble for protecting from a bully, who never seemed grateful. Even at family gatherings it would be an outright lie to say I wanted to spend time reminiscing with them, or that I spent time that way. There were of course a lot of cousins I only ever knew as names on a list, if that; people I never have spent time with. Still, they were cousins; telling other people not to hire them for jobs, or playing mean tricks on one of them and trying to blame another one, or trying to interfere in any serious way with their ives, never crossed my mind. I didn't imagine it crossed theirs, either.

Well...for one of us, I now know, that sort of disloyalty not only crossed his mind but became positively a career. The estate of an elder (which wasn't even a million dollars) turned some relatives against each other, and then Old Wrymouth, that tool of Satan, my Professional Bad Neighbor, started positively sowing discord and aggravating ill will. No sooner had some relatives, for instance, asked me to go to their house and have a look at an animal, than that house started being vandalized. I have not gone within sight of the house since. The rift between another person and person's parents has also been made into a scandal, though as far as athat's concerned many people quarrel with their parents. One of us is trying to tear the whole extended family apart--and some of us are letting him.

It is a great mistake to think that any of our individual gifts and talents will compensate for the loss of the solidarity we used to have. All people are given talents. We had the greater gift of loyalty. On the most infantile level it was what kept my father, when he had polio and stopped growing, from being bullied at school; kept me and most of the girls my age from being harassed or molested; kept a tight lid on any harassment of some relatives with conspicuous disabilities. On more adult levels it was the same: it was not a good idea for anyone outside the family to start a fight with anyne inside it. The young should not imagine that being brilliant or good-looking, although they are those things, will keep other people from hating them. On the contrary those things will make haters hate them even more. 

5. Up to about 2010 I believed that, when I had celiac-type reactions and had not knowingly eaten wheat products, I must have eaten something into which a little wheat flour had dropped by accident. From 2010 to 2015, as these incidents became more common, I believed genetically modified foods might be to blame. In 2015 I was tipped off to the possibility that glyphosate contamination was to blame. Long story short (see the whole rest of this web site), I found no evidence that anything but glyphosate was causing these reactions, and no evidence that glyphosate exposure ever failed to cause them. There are celiacs who deny it, but I saw that, for me, glyphosate affects celiacs the same way wheat gluten does, only much moreso.

Bayer/Monsanto and the other commercial companies that make a profit on glyphosate hate me for havng noticed this.