Stop and Smell the People

From my point of view…

Truthfully, before I met Anna I didn’t really give much thought to household cleaners, lawn fertilizers and organic food.

But I have a cultural detachment from such things. I was raised in the 1960s and the only chemicals I was exposed to inside our home was whatever is in Ajax, and my dad’s Sir Walter Raleigh cigarette smoke. I was also exposed to steel mill soot spewing into the skies above the “Steel Valley” in Northeastern Ohio. How that affected me is unknown at this point.

All this other stuff, all these chemicals in cleaners, leaching out of plastics, the hormones fed to chickens and cows and the powerful modern pesticides being used on our crops, are new to me.

How is going organic affecting me? Well, it’s annoying NOT to have the greenest most perfect lawn in the neighborhood. I’m learning to live with weeds. My mother is Italian and makes the finest pasta and meatballs anyone I know has ever had. Her recipe calls for cans of strained tomato sauce which back in the day were just metal… but today are internally coated with plastic containing Bisphenol A (BPA). My pasta sauce tastes different now because I’m using different  ingredients. But I miss that familiar, comforting taste. I don’t have all the bleaching cleansers available to combat grime in the crevices of our bathrooms. But my wife has taken over that now so score one for me!

Another affect is I sleep better. I do. I sleep better because I know my baby boy is getting the best shot a a healthy life. I don’t know what is causing all the increased diseases and disorders in our children. I’m not smart enough to add it all together. But even my limited mind tells me that there MIGHT be a microscopic connection between all these hormones and chemicals and pesticides and what’s happening to our children.

It’s not the 1960s anymore. We had three TV channels, no video games, one phone for the whole family and it was screwed to a wall in the kitchen, I walked to school and church so I only rode in a car for big trips to see relatives or vacations, we never fertilized our lawns or gardens and the list goes on and on.

Kids today are not living the way I lived. I had lead paint. They have poison coming at them from a 100o sources.

Is it all bad? Heck no. My oldest brother died at three from leukemia 11 years before I was born. He died because that was 1949 when they put you on a morphine drip and watched the cancer slowly kill you.  Today, survival rates for children are as follows:

Acute lymphocytic leukemia 90.9 percent for children under 5

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia 78.8 percent

Acute myelogenous leukemia 60.2 percent for children under 15

Chronic myelogenous leukemia 53.3 percent

In the late 1940s Leukemia was like getting a death sentence. There have been amazing medical advancements and astonishing technological breakthroughs transforming the lives of today’s youth. But that’s only half the story.

The other half is a mystery. We don’t know what has caused the huge jumps in Autism and many other developmental disconnects in our children.

So until we get our arms around the dark side of all our modernism, I’m going organic and staying there… MR