Back to the lecture at hand
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007I’ve not been feeling very communicative over the last few days. I blame the weather. Everything is moist and sticky and gray and it sucks. Walking takes a huge amount of effort.
Yesterday, I read about toxins and carcinogens in personal care products, plastics, and toys on at least three or four different and unrelated sites. Obviously, recently published reports certainly had an impact on that frequency, but it got my wheels turning.
See, here’s where I’ll admit something to whoever happens to read this: I do nearly all of my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. This is not something that I’m happy about and I don’t enjoy supporting them since they violate pretty much every principle of mine. But for the time being I am the breadwinner for our family and I have a BA in English, so you can imagine that money is pretty tight.
When we first started out on our own, we were shopping at the regular local grocery store and even with coupons, we couldn’t afford more than two weeks’ worth of food there. Bottom line: we need to eat all four weeks out of the month. It is pretty shameful how difficult it is to buy food and other products that are good for you or at the very least not potentially harmful. Just buying fresh produce eats up a large portion of our grocery budget. Buying organic and/or locally-grown food on a regular basis is something that we might be able to afford to do in a few years’ time, but it is simply not an option right now. So I can avoid the chemicals and starve or fill my belly with something and count the days until I feel that first lump. Awesome.
Such is life. If you’re not wealthy, you can’t afford to buy food that doesn’t owe much of its existence to laboratories and mad scientists. That in turn causes health problems, which your shitty insurance won’t cover. But your health problems have to be addressed, so you go on medications that half of the time are later discovered to be more harmful than whatever you had in the first place. Awesome. But it does really bother me that the U.S. government is seemingly just not bothered by this kind of thing at all. The stuff in our environment is so bad for us, but imposing any kind of inspections or regulations would hurt business and be un-American and god forbid human lives win out over businesses and bunk American mythology.
As an aside, have you seen the commercials for the new medication for Restless Leg Syndrome?
It can cause compulsive gambling. I can’t wait until we get to the medications that cause compulsive punching-pharmaceutical-CEOs-in-the-face.
