by Northsage

Created on: April 19, 2008

What a strange world we inhabit and how strange we humans have become. Each day there are revelations about new diseases or old ones that are becoming practically epidemic because of exposure to environmental factors that are new to recent generations. Chemicals that cause pre-cancerous lesions in and on mice are in baby bottles and are now present in the bodies of something like 90% of infants. The same chemicals are in the containers that the modern world drinks bottled water from. Asthma, Alzheimer's disease, dozens of cancers, digestive problems, heart disease, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, autism, attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and many, many other mental illnesses, obesity and associated joint diseases, and a whole alphabet of afflictions are assaulting us today, because of what we eat, drink, inject, inhale or apply to our skin and hair. We irradiate our brains with microwaves by talking on cell phones or heating our food. We obsess about hair where we wish that it was not or still was. We sand off rough patches of dry foot skin, dye our hair, distort our spines and feet with pointy-toed high heeled shoes, add color to our faces, to draw attention to, or away from, features we are unsatisfied with because of cultural influences we all feel on a daily basis. Cosmetic surgeons reduce or enlarge our body parts because nobody seems to be content with the way we were born.

Few of us walk anywhere or sweat with activities that were necessary for our grandparent's normal lives or survival. A large percentage of us are now becoming huge sacks of quivering goo, or are neurotic, bulimic, anorexic, physical wrecks because we have a love/hate relationship with food!

Cults and bizarre religions recruit many disillusioned, unloved, and unhappy people who are unable to find a place in this society of neurotics and exploit them further. In Texas, a hoax prompted authorities to take hundreds of children from a Mormon baby factory because society repudiated the strategy of burning them alive, (remember Waco?) to "protect" them from assumed abuse. Last week a nice, well-meaning woman handed me a "Watchtower" pamphlet one day, and I politely refused to be recruited by her husband the very next day, on my meal delivery route. I do not try to reason people away from their religious beliefs, just because I am not a religious person and I wish that they would not evangelize to me.

I think it was Thoreau, who advised us all to just "simplify" our lives and I think he might have been onto something. How many of us are happy with the direction modern-day life is taking us? If we claim that we are, are we just fooling ourselves, because we do not really have an alternative? We all have to live in this society, but maybe if we made an effort to incrementally simplify things that we do and want, we might live happier and longer. I have never bought a container of bottled water or a cell phone and I probably never will.

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