I wanted this post to go live while some people Out There are still thinking about our Swahili word for this week. I meant it to be posted on 12.29.24. Due to mouse bounce, it was buried as if it had been posted on 12.22.24. While I was in the process of fixing this, the electricity went off...the Cat Sanctuary hadn't seen heavy rain, but it had been rainy, and the wind blew through trees further up the mountain. So here I am at McDonald's, trying to find a way to report the outage, and McDonald's Internet connection is feeble, which is not giving much hope for the chance of my coming home to a warm (or at least unfrozen) house. Anyway, here is the Sunday post, belatedly.
Kamala Harris released a video that reminded me that it's ku-ji-cha-gu-li-a, no real stressed syllable as in English, so that the Swahili word can sound to Americans like "Kuji Chagu Lia." Everybody probably knows a person called Lia or Leah, at least the well-preserved actress Leah Remini, so they may associate this word with that person. I tend to let kujichagulia rhyme with "Julia," which gives the word a clueless American accent.
Some readers dislike Kwanzaa. A meme that was going around last week supposedly polled people, "Which holiday is real: Kwanzaa, Juneteenth, or Toyotathon?" and 88% of respondents said Toyotathon. As a guess this poll was taken at a Toyota dealership. That's not what this post is about. (The position of this web site is that we all wish everyone happy holidays, whichever of the dozens of winter holidays they may or may not observe.)
Some point out that Kwanzaa is an awfully new tradition, founded by a man who some believe was guilty of kidnapping and torture during the 1960s color war, and who is still a race bigot. Dr. Karenga is an old man and, if he did the things for which he spent time in jail, he needs to repent, lest the Whirling Blender Blades of Justice for Domestic Violence come after him. That's his problem. That's not what this post is about. (The question was raised whether Kamala Harris could possibly have observed Kwanzaa as a child. I could believe it. Very few people our age heard of Kwanzaa as children but Harris's father was politically sympathetic to Dr. Karenga, so the Harris sisters might have been among the first.)
Ishmael Reed, who I'm glad to see is still formidable at age 86, used to point out some things about Swahili and challenge his Black students to learn Yoruba, which is much more difficult for English speakers to learn. Well, there are a lot of African languages a person might choose to learn, most of them more challenging than Swahili. If you feel drawn to an African language that your ancestors may have spoken, you might want to visit that country and celebrate their special days. That's beyond the scope of this web site so it's not what this post is about, either.
This post is about a misstep one of our leaders is making, at a time when people across the nation are thinking about the virtue it violates. RFK didn't consult this web site about this idea:
The total ban on poison sprays needs to come first. When the supposedly "healthier" choices are full of glyphosate, soda pop is health food (adding needed calories to my diet of mostly chickweed in the 2010s, e.g.).
"But it's not that bad now, is it? People can eat oranges and drink water now, can't they?"
At this time of year, they have that option, if it works for them. Maybe it does; maybe it doesn't. Oranges seem to trap most glyphosate residues in the peels; orange peels used to be the ultimate winter sweet treat with immune-boosting power trapped under the sugar. Now orange peels are toxic waste but oranges are safe to eat. Still, I can't say what works for you. You can't say what works for me. This happens to be the time of year when some of us, whatever the faults of the writer who started the tradition, reflect on the value of kujichagulia, self-determination. Self-determination means we focus on making our choices for ourselves and not interfering with other people's choices.
However nutritious a food item might be, if one person tells another person to eat it, that is not healthy.
However junky or indigestible it might be, if one person tells another person not to eat it, that is not healthy.
It's not healthy to allow anyone to be a food bully or a food nanny. If somebody says "Ooohhh, don't drink soda pop, it's ba-a-a-ad for you," that person badly needs to see you chug a big bottle of soda pop in that person's face.
I, personally, do drink water. I have this terribly cute little family ritual of sharing bottled water with the cats. As a frugal choice I'd say you can filter your own tap water cheaper than you can buy pre-filtered tap water, on which corporations are making a killing. As a personal choice, well, I brought in a bottle of water on a day when coolness really was worth paying for, poured out about a tablespoonful for a long-ago cat called Ivy, and thus started a tradition of sharing a bottle of water with the cats. So now the cats and I get Pure Life water delivered to the front gate, and we do indeed share it and like it.
One day this week, I was out in the yard. There'd been a lot of rain and not much evaporation. There were natural puddles of water, as well as cans trapping water in the recycling. The cats had lots of natural water options. And they nonverbally said to me, "Aren't you going to sit down on the steps, pour water into dishes for us, sip the rest of the water while we drink our portions, and spend a few minutes petting each of us in turn? It's not cold today! The water won't freeze!"
Earlier in the week they had had to keep licking at the ice that kept forming on a big bowl of rain water, keeping a hole through which they could slurp up a little cold water.
I said, "You have water."
They said, "But that's not the kind of water we share with you! Please, we want to share a bottle of water with you again! Mew mew mew!"
It's about the sharing. They like their Pure Life water, and don't anybody start nagging and nannying about the plastic bottles it comes in. You, too, can use plain water to start a bonding ritual with furred or feathered friends. If you don't want to buy bottles, use a special glass or pitcher that never touches your mouth to avoid sharing any cross-species disease germs.
And then again I also like liquids that have some flavor, as all humans on Earth always have done, and in that category, the liquids we need to worry about are the naturally fermented kind that smell so disgusting (to me, anyway) that it ought to be obvious that nature intended them to be used as cleaning fluid, but some people drink them. Some people become addicted to drinking them. Experience teaches us that scratching the surface of a whine about how much soda pop Americans drink usually uncovers someone trying to sell those nasty fermented things to Americans instead.
As a healthier alternative to foul stuff like beer and wine, we in the Southern States drink soda pop. I buy it, I sell it, I serve it, I thank God for it. We should be celebrating the drinks Southerners invented to encourage people to make healthier beverage choices. I don't currently buy the big-name brands of soda pop because they've doubled their prices for no valid reason but greed, but I do salute Coca-Cola, Pepsi, RC, Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, Mello Yello, Sundrop, and Sunkist for their role in building a culture of sobriety.
We in the United States need to support our culture of sobriety and help Europeans to understand that if they, too, can choose coffee and soda pop over wine and beer, they may be able to progress beyond their culture of tribal warfare and live like civilized human beings. We need to be stepping back, looking at Russia and Ukraine, and asking, "How much of that could be avoided if those wretched people had learned to drink civilized beverages with their meals? When will Europeans stop poisoning themselves with alcohol and start drinking soda pop...since they, poor creatures, no longer have the option of drinking good clean water, having polluted all their springs."
And although we need to be offering more positive encouragement for people to break that welfare addiction that causes them to quit jobs for which they've been hired, punishing welfare addicts for the food choices they make is not going to help with that.
"They come in with their food stamps and take a shopping cart," said an employee of a store that has room for two small shopping carts, "and fill that cart with soda pop and energy drinks. They don't buy bread, meat, potatoes..."
I said, "Wait a minute. They are trying to support your store because they appreciate your being in their neighborhood! So what are they finding in your store? What do you sell? Candy and chips, soda pop and tobacco! Gas for cars and snacks for humans are all very well, but many's the time I've wanted to buy food for a few days in your store, and the pickings are not merely slim. They are skeletal. Where is the rice? Where are the beans? Where are the canned goods, like tomatoes and pineapple? When was the last time I saw a sack of potatoes in your store? I don't buy bread, but do you ever sell bread? More often than not, whatever kind of fresh fruit is in season, because you don't have a steady flow of sales for fresh fruit you don't buy very much very often, and all you have in there are a couple of green bananas! You buy a bunch of green bananas and hope to sell them before they turn brown, but surely you know that, if most White people eat a banana that's not turned brown, their whole family will complain." (My husband always had a bunch of bananas in the kitchen, and there might have been two or three times, in ten years, when he let one of those bananas ripen to a stage where I could eat it.) "How can you blame the people who buy junkfood with food stamps when they are trying to be neighborly and trade in a store that hardly ever sells anything but junkfood?!"
That was a few years ago. When I'm in that store, I try, if I have a dollar or two to spare, to buy a can just to encourage them to keep cans of beans, corn, and tomatoes on the shelves. They do not sell those things at the Wal-Mart price. Well, that wouldn't be very profitable for them, would it, when they buy the beans at Wal-Mart. They don't send the delivery truck all the way to Sam's Club. They do not buy in sufficient bulk to make it profitable to have an account at Sam's Club. So I nag them, and when I can I encourage them, just to have cans of vegetables in the store at all. But what move fast enough that they don't have to sell stale, dusty containers at half price are still those bottled drinks. There is no need to be hypocritical about this. Anybody who gets $200 in food stamps and says to perself, "I'm going to spend $50 at the neighborhood convenience store," is going to buy a load of bottled drinks. And we as a society need to be giving thanks that that person is choosing non-addictive, American-made soda pop over vile, addictive European beverages.
Anybody telling that food stamp shopper to drink water...deserves to have a strip of tape with "ELITIST SNOB & BIGOT" printed on it, slapped across per mouth. While peeling off the sticky tape, they should be rehearsing a speech along the lines of "May God have mercy on this misguided soul. What has this servant been spared to buy from Your Kindness, paying cash? This servant needs a hundred dollars' worth now." If anything is going to nudge that poor addict to break the addiction and get back into the healthy American habit of earning money and paying cash, it'll be showing respect for the person's self-determination at the point where it can be helpful to a person who wants to build self-determination.
Bottom line: government's attempt to tell people how to be healthy has been a world-class epic fail in the past five years. Robert Kennedy may be the Chieftain of Glyphosate Awareness but most welfare addicts don't have Glyphosate Awareness; to them even Kennedy is just another rich person, and if he's telling them not to buy something they like, that's an old rich White man who does not look or sound very healthy, himself, meddling with THEIR choices...this is not going to end well. He should just drop this bad idea and focus on laying the foundation for the change that will make it possible for those welfare addicts to discover that they can, once again, have a V8 and not feel any sicker than they would after having a Pepsi.
(Ohhh, V8 nostalgia. My father used to like V8. He'd send me to the store to buy cases of it and give a few cans to the driver to show her family how delicious it was. V8 was a savory tomato juice enriched with potassium-loaded vegetables, so the sodium and potassium balanced and replenished what you'd lost from sweat on a hot day. In the present century those vegetables have been sprayed with glyphosate, and people I've seen still trying to drink V8 have not kept it down.)
Coca-Cola is big because, more than a hundred years ago, the product's founders offered the world a very good idea--a sweet, convenient drink that tasted better than wine and offered a healthier, milder caffeine boost than coffee. In its place that's still a good thing.
The trouble is that, because Coke used to be cheap, people were drinking it instead of water or milk, and now that it's no longer so cheap people are in the habit of drinking Coke instead of water or milk. Those people are being exploited. Often they would feel better if they drank water instead of Coke; often they're getting more caffeine than they need and not even feeling the "lift" because they're hypernatremic. Hypernatremia means too much sodium (from soda pop and salt in food) in the blood. It feels like major depression, a headache, fatigue--like a howling need for caffeine, but it's not relieved by drinking more Coke. It's relieved (slowly) by drinking water and (faster) by eating some raw greens or a banana, something with potassium in it. People who can afford to live in the city neighborhood where they can walk to Whole Foods can demonstrate this effect, even in the ghetto. If the greens (in a window box) or the banana (at the convenience store) have not been available in the ghetto, once ghetto people experience the benefit of them, they will be. There is the real benefit to poor people's health that a misguided better-off person wanted to feel good about bringing to the ghetto neighborhood.
But the way to make that benefit available is so-o-o-o not to say, imperiously or condescendingly, "You should not drink Coke." Sometimes, for their own purposes, people should drink Coke. Poor people need to stay awake at least as much as rich people do. Other times, when they should drink water and eat raw greens, they should have been exposed to the knowledge that that is a quick, easy, cheap way some people can feel a great deal better in minutes. But nobody needs to tell them which of those two choices to make or whether to make some other one. Kujichagulia! In order to get the full benefit of the healthy choice, they need to make it themselves.
The role of ordinary people in the Glyphosate Awareness movement is to demonstrate and publicize the benefit eating raw greens used to have, and can have again, when the greens aren't poisonous. The role of government is simply to stop the greens being poisoned, and then get out of the way and let people exercise their self-determination in discovering the benefits of, once again, having access to clean, healthy greens.
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