Actually, as regular readers know, I do care passionately about what happens to the rest of the world, but this week I read another activist's poem that contained the kind of vague generalized guilt trip, especially with the (probably unintended) echoes of left-wingnut rhetoric, that makes me feel just as complacent as a particularly hypothyroid cow. Moo moo, whatever they're on about this time, I'm quite sure I didn't do it and it's not my problem! "Don't you even caaare that...?" "No, actually I don't!"
In support of her position that what makes the special Verbal Attack Patterns so hateful is the way their spoken intonation adds a layer of unspoken, deniable hostility, the late Suzette Haden Elgin observed that it's possible to say "Don't you even care that..." in a tone of bemused bewilderment that sounds less hostile than "Don't you even caaare that..." This is true but, since the tone of bemused bewilderment still presupposes that YOUR NOT BEING AS AGITATED ABOUT THIS AS I AM IS BIZARRE, I think it's still a good pattern of rhetoric for activists to avoid.
It's easy for people working on things like Glyphosate Awareness to see that verbal attack (I think the poem was about water pollution; it was, like the polluted water, not very clear) and raise it a few levels. Don't you even caaare that anybody can still spray this POISON that is KILLING people who are and are not even of Irish descent BY TORTURE and you just SIT there acting as if wretched COVID were an issue of comparable...We need not to go there.
COVID is real too. Most of us may not have noticed when we had it the first time, and the people who died may have been old and/or sick anyway, but people did die and they were missed. I am convinced that glyphosate not only has done more harm to humankind than COVID but also was involved in many, if not most, if not all, COVID vaccine fatalities. I feel ready to let COVID blow over like the nothingburger it was, because my mother died of glyphosate-aggravated liver cancer before COVID reached our part of the world. But some people's parents died of COVID...and/or vaccine reactions.
Now it's true that, due to a couldn't-have-made-it-up combination of greed and shortsightedness, the commercial media whipped everyone into a state of frantic hypersensitivity to COVID, practically forced doctors to treat everything as COVID-related if they treated it at all, while simultaneously denying, denying, denying glyphosate reactions as an issue of medical concern. The numbers scream off the page. The blood howls from the ground. The commercial media have lost all credibility and deserve a painful corporate death-of-a-thousand-snubs. The fact remains that unless Joe Sixpack happens not only to be a "Spoonie" with an unpredictable and verifiably glyphosate-triggered chronic disease, but also able to avoid glyphosate enough of the time to know when he has and hasn't been exposed, he does not even yet physically realize that he's having glyphosate reactions--although he probably is. It's not that, like COVID, glyphosate reactions are something a person is likely to have and not notice. It's that glyphosate reactions tend to be aggravations of conditions that existed before glyphosate did, which makes it so diabolically easy for the corporate shills to bamboozle people about what's actually going on in their bodies.
Yes, for all the celiacs I know and for huge numbers of non-celiacs, glyphosate reactions are just like celiac reactions only moreso. For thousands of years celiacs who ate unsprayed wheat didn't develop sprue before age 60. Glyphosate has been known to produce sprue reactions in children. When I read that at least one celiac support group (in Canada) did not believe they had celiac reactions to glyphosate, my first reaction was "Well they've drunk the Kool-Aid," but for all I know there may be celiacs who don't have celiac-type reactions to glyphosate. Maybe they have some other pattern of reactions. Some people of southern European descent, and some animals, don't show immediate reactions themselves, but give birth to physically damaged offspring after exposure to glyphosate. A human who has that reaction might easily not be trying to have babies, and thus really not have a reaction to glyphosate. I'm not sure how or whether it's possible for a celiac not to have a reaction to glyphosate, but it might be. We've all seen that this unnatural molecule has several properties that were previously unknown, if not impossible. Medical science needs to study people who claim not to react to glyphosate. We can't just write them off as liars.
Joe Sixpack has heard that glyphosate caused cancer in a few people who were exposed to unusually high amounts of it. Well, he doesn't have cancer, he wasn't exposed to unusually high amounts of it, and while he knows his old weakness--coughing or irregular digestion or dyslexia or whatever--worsened between 1980 and 2009, worsened a lot between 2009 and 2018, went into remission in late 2020, and has been bothering him again since 2021, he did have it before 1980. Meanwhile people who sound very sciencey have told him that it's just an hereditary condition that was bound to worsen with age whatever he did. You have to have observed your own symptoms pretty rigorously to be able not to fall for it.
So if we grab him by the collar and scream "DON'T you even CAAARE?" Joe Sixpack is quite likely to say, "No, actually I don't. I'm not sure you even know what you're talking about. No matter how much people like Priscilla King may say about not supporting a globalust takeover by weakening American businesses, that's exactly what other people in Glyphosate Awareness have always wanted. I think you're being exploited by George Soros and his minions. In any case I don't have non-Hodgkins lymphoma so what I have is probably hereditary and going to kill me, and I don't feel healthy enough to do anything about it, because I had the COVID vaccine..."
Being patient with Joe Sixpack's intellectual squishiness does call for those special Irish celiac super-powers (some of us) have. But do it. Empathize with his concerns, and insist that he and his doctor test samples for correlations between glyphosate exposure and any chronic internal bleeding condition, independent of COVID vaccine exposure. If such a correlation is found, that will make it easier to verify the role of contaminated vaccines in the reactions people have had, and collect due compensation for those who were disabled or whose family members were killed by contaminated vaccines.
Of course a lot of people in Glyphosate Awareness were wary about taking a new vaccine for a non-fatal disease, so getting settlements for vaccine-related injuries is of no personal interest to us. My personal feeling about the vaccine lawsuits is "Another smokescreen! How long dear Savior O how long...and can a piece of Bayer be saved for those of us who've been trying to conceal and suppress symptoms SINCE THE 1980S?!" And it is hard to maintain any respect for the poor dweebs who think some new theory about "global climate change"...no, really, local warming and air pollution are real too. Even in CHD I'm sure there are people whose focus of attention was guided by meretricious and even exploitative considerations, but most of us tend to focus on what we personally see as the biggest physical danger to ourselves and our families.
I will say this, though. Some people don't realize how totally any echo of "global climate change" or "social justice" rhetoric shuts down any sympathy among large sectors of the US population. Not because they are mean people or racists or whatever; because they think you are. Language Soros-funded groups would reward tends to generate a reaction, in the rest of the population, like "So you want me dead and my grandchildren living in slums eating mealworms, right? I still don't know exactly what you're blathering about, but if it hurts you it can't be all bad!"
To the poets reading this web site, some of whom may have won grants or fellowships by using Progspeak, I say: Global socialism may still generate warm fuzzy feelings in some circles, but since it's been associated with the COVID vaccine fiasco, you should be aware that using Progspeak is, I don't know, maybe more likely to be taken seriously than waving a Nazi flag? Do not mistake the censored media's reportage for an accurate view of contemporary reality. MSNBC may have a few billions left to burn through, and elected officials may have a few voters hog-tied by the handout check, but independent writers cannot afford to say to a lot of very disenchanted Americans "Yes, I'm one of the people who killed your father."
One PSU poet has been annoying me regularly this winter. (Person knows who person is.) I feel good will toward this poet. I actually think per free verse poems make some good points. But in such a doomed way. How is it possible, I ask myself, for person not to be aware of the backlash against WHO and their scheme to use the now discredited COVID vaccine to take over the world? You want utility companies to invest in more household solar collectors, or private people to think of walking to the store as something beautiful people do because we can, you do not cite the World Bank as an authority. If someone at the World Bank says it's raining outside, that does not automatically cause the rain to stop, but even so, if you have not personally verified that it's raining outside it would be a good idea to report that you believe it's raining outside because someone more trustworthy than the World Bank said it was.
Do I care about pollution? Child. I was born and raised caring about pollution. I may be the last living non-Amish American who was taught to drive a horse before I learned to drive a car. I own a truck, have never driven it, and I still walk or wait for a car pool to the grocery store because I never formed the habit of driving. (The truck was for the purpose of transporting my late lamented Significant Other; making it roadworthy was his responsibility. So it's not roadworthy.) I never formed the habit of watching television, either. Using a water-flush toilet doesn't really call for a change of habits, but I have formed the habit of using a solar-powered dry-flush toilet and burning the output.
I do not, however, care about the latest World Bank claim that the world needs global tyranny to reduce pollution. The events of the past hundred years or so have shown that, while government bloat does reduce the profitability of many things including pollution, government bloat has no effect whatsoever on the actual pollution.
We do live on a round planet where everything is likely to blow or flow to any and every place, eventually. We do need to think globally about the effects of what we see as personal choices. For example, when Americans send electronics to be "recycled," the toxic chemicals that make electronics work do not seep slowly into the ground around the local landfill. They are directly handled and reprocessed by poor people in what was reportedly a rather pretty little town in China, with a scenic river, until the Chinese government decided to make it a toxic waste dump. Reportedly those people don't speak English so they don't blog about the effects this policy is having on them, while they live and raise children amidst the toxic electronic waste. If you think about it you'll understand why I react so unfavorably to the idea of replacing computers every few years. I've accumulated several computers, and yes, each one does have a few useful features the others lack, but I don't really care about their clever little features. I'm just doing my bit to keep them out of landfills, or out of formerly pretty little towns in China. Because I care.
And? So? What have you done about glyphosate lately?
We need to respect and support one another's efforts to clean up our world and make it possible for our one child apiece to grow up/ Nobody can work on all the issues; most of us will focus on one or two. In the nature of being active and educating people about our issues we will inevitably confront one another's lifestyle choices.
Verbal abuse may come easily to mind when we think about the harm the various toxins we're trying to clean up have done to human beings. Glyphosate sprayers killed my mother. Maybe COVID vaccine killed yours. Maybe someone close to you never smoked, but died of lung cancer associated with motor vehicle exhaust fumes. Or brain damage associated with spray paint. Or cancer associated with radiation from experiments with nuclear energy. We no longer believe we have a duty to kill people we blame for any of these causes of death, but it can be easy to feel that doing so would be a pleasure. Dog people everywhere have fantasized about doing to Dr. Fauci what he did to those beagles, and some of them would probably enjoy doing that, if it were declared legal.
Verbal abuse, however, is not usually the most effective teaching method. (Some baby-boomers remember teachers who spent their careers proving this.) Verbal abuse tends to make people feel defensive and bitterly cling to their ignorance. Or laziness. Or miserliness. Or fear that, e.g., more sophisticated uses of solar power than simply putting the water heater in front of a southwest window might present fire hazards. Or feeling that if we make Green choices A, B, C, and D, people should keep their bleep mouths shut about our not making Green choice E.
I use layers of disposable plastic bags to keep frozen food frozen while carrying it, because I walk, and then while it's in the cooler bin, because I don't run an electric refrigerator, and then later to collect the toilet output and get it burning, because I don't flush bodywastes into other people's drinking water, and if anybody has any concerns about the filtration system they're more than welcome to pay for a properly vented and filtered, mostly-underground furnace that would be much more efficient than just burning all the garbage in a barrel. I do what I can with what I have. Very likely to be more than you do...
You, perhaps, raise all your own vegetables so you don't think you need to worry so much about pesticide residues in commercially grown food. Well, you do, because pesticide residues get into the air and water too, but raising your own vegetables is excellent. I'm delighted. My land is naturally suited to be an orchard not a vegetable garden, and for me living entirely on what grows on my land feels like a hardship, but if that's not the case for you, well, blessed be. So you feel less of a burden for people who don't have land or the ability to raise vegetables on it, and you have energy to focus on coal-burning power plants/ You knew someone who lived next to one and died of lung cancer at age 58. You taught a class at the school near one, and noticed the way some of the children were coughing...
We can and should debate about strategy. Some people working on air pollution just want to trust big government to fix it. I don't have much faith that big government will. Talk about better filtration on the existing plant, and phasing it out by reducing electricity consumption and getting more of the electricity from private solar collection systems, sounds more credible to me than talk about how Candidate A would solve the problem and Candidate B wouldn't. I can believe that both candidates might want to be able to solve that problem and any number of others too, but history has shown that often A's claiming to be able to solve that problem shows that A is either less realistic, or less honest, or both than B is. There are things a presidential executive order can do, but one of the best and truest things a President of the United States ever said was, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." In the US it seems to be most noticeably the Republican Party, but all political parties always need to put their backs where their mouths are.
And so ad infinitum. We don't need in-fighting, in any case; the greedheads are doing us enough damage without in-fighting. We need to respect each other's work and support it when we can.
(Sunday posts at this web site are supposed to be where the Christian content goes. Do you believe, Gentle Readers, that for me this post is Christian content? It was provoked by someone whose religious affiliation I don't know but whose name comes from a non-Christian culture, so it was written, without conscious thought, in neutral language. This web site officially blesses all sincere compassion for the Earth and those who live on it, in whatever name people know.)
