The Open Boat
Critical Issues and A Letter
"The lesson which I pass on by this means is worth all
the trouble it has cost me."
Antoine St. Exupery
Key to discrediting people with chemical sensitivity is to keep them marginalized. As one of my efforts to remedy this, I am in the process of writing a letter to Senator Diane Feinstein, an acquaintance of a good friend of mine in Puerto Vallarta.
[click here] for theLetter to Senator Diane Feinstein
MARGINALIZE; prevent from having attention or power: to take or keep somebody or something away from the center of attention, influence, or power.
This page ended up being rather longer than the rest, but that is because many of the concepts are different from what we have been generally taught. My sister Ellen complained because I sent her a 60 page letter, explaining chemical sensitivity. In response to her, I would say that this issue does not lend itself to concision, a word popularized by Noam Chomsky.
"Concision,” Chomsky says, “that means you can say something between two commercials. That’s a terrific technique of propaganda. - you can repeat conventional ideology or you can sound like you're from Neptune."
The issue of chemical sensitivity goes way beyond myself. The recognition of chemical sensitivity is at the crux of all the critical issues that we face today. It is a pivotal point, enlightening us to the total dependence of human health on our environment.
Everyone acknowledges some environmental effects on health but most people are completely unaware of the direct one-to-one correlation that environmental medicine highlights.
Chemical sensitivity is mistakenly viewed as an isolated illness instead of correctly perceived as the extreme end of a continuum of illness caused by toxic chemicals. The number of people in the U.S. today who can trace their lack of complete health or vitality to exposure to toxic chemicals - most of which are easily within their control to minimize - is in epidemic proportions.
The public remains unaware because they are led to believe that the symptoms of chemical sensitivity that they experience are due to other causes. For example: autonomic nervous system disfunction (racing heart beat) is diagnosed as "Stress"; inability to sleep is diagnosed as "Anxiety" or "Depression", obesity [click here] is diagnosed as "Lack of Exercise" or "Over-eating"; depression itself is diagnosed as an emotional disfunction; and hyperactivity or irritability are diagnosed as "Bipolar Disorder" - if you are an adult - and "ADHD" [click here] - if you are a child. All these are symptoms of chemical sensitivity in its beginning stages.
People vary enormously - up to 100,00 times - in their reaction to toxic substances . Facts [click here]
Cancer is correctly attributed to environmental factors but exactly which factors remain cloudy in conventional medicine, where they are clearly outlined in environmental medicine. [Watch Video]
"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely
a fraud and that the major cancer research organisations
are derelict in their duties to the people who support
them."
- Linus Pauling PhD
(Two-time Nobel Prize winner)
This is information that activists - political, environmental, social - have a desperate need of. All of our destructive modes of living are being openly challenged today except the conventional medical system where the prevailing myth is that we just need more of it. The result is that all honest efforts are hampered by lack of vitality.
Through media and advertising, -including television and movies-, people are led to believe that technological services like Kaiser Permanente will enable them to "THRIVE" instead of pure air, food and water. The unstated message - in the advertising of pharmaceutical medicine and other manufactured propaganda - is that the effects of a chemical-free environment are either negligible or beyond the control of the average citizen. This picture is completely false.
EXCERPT from
Chemical Manufacturers Association memo:
[click here]
"In the planning stages [year 1981] are the development of television
story ideas for weekly shows and made-for-television movies that will
portray business-
[toxic chemicals] - in a positive light."
It should be noted that most pharmaceutical companies also manufacture toxic chemicals, usually under a different company name or subsidiary. This industry also funds approximately 30% of the cost of medical training for physicians - which may account for the lack of acknowledgement of toxicity in conventional medicine.
Recognition of environmental medicine is essential if people are to be able to make the right decisions in governing themselves.
People who begin to lose vitality through environmental degradation, people who could be making meaningful change in the environment, with a personal firsthand knowledge of the effects of pollution, are siphoned off into individual crisies, many times characterized by sleeping pills, anti-depressants and psychotherapy.
This leaves our rush to environmental suicide unchecked and deprives everyone of the vital energy needed to meet the significant challenge to democracy that is before us.
An efficient health care system would mean one where most of us were well most of the time.
By defining lack of vigor and vitality as a psychological problem, as the current medical system does, the public is disabled. When people lack the physical energy necessary for efforts to maintain a democracy, law-abiding citizens become easy prey for despots.
Self-responsibility depends on self-education and the longer we delay, the more difficult it will become. As Robert Kennedy, Jr. observes in "The 'Junk Science' of George W. Bush",
"Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration--aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals--are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. ... Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact "for partisan political ends."
[click here] for Bill Moyers: None But All of Us
MANUFACTURED DOUBT
While the Bushites and their corporate sponsors solemnly assert that governmental actions should be based on "the best science available," what they really mean is the best science they can twist to support their position. They have become especially expert at deploying a PR tactic that professor David Michaels has recently dubbed, "manufactured doubt." By creating even a small uncertainty about a particular scientific reality, industry can defeat public policies that would protect We the People from corporate profiteering.
Jim Hightower
The Hightower Report
July 29, 2005
"When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was
carried beyond myself by the inspiring force
of urgent necessity."
-Antoine St. Exupery
