The Open Boat

Family

"There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity."
Paul Bourget

The background and the story of my family is the story of how you can experience scarcity in a middle class family in the wealthiest nation on earth, and how you can experience ill health married to a physician graduating with honors. The story illustrates how environmental medicine is key to distinguishing between "seeming" and "being".

Everyone asks me - what about your family? My family's response to me is a phenomenon that is more challenging for people to understand than chemical sensitivity.

My family was given the impression that the more difficulty I had the better because then I would be forced back into the system to be disposed of by conventional pharmaceutical treatment. The result was that I suffered irreparable harm at the hands of the very people who should have protected me.

My family fell prey to another weakness in human nature, one that was studied by Stanley Milgram in the 1960's in response to the atrocities of WWII. Milgrim found in a series of controlled experiments,

"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. … A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."

Stanley Milgram (1965)

The friends closest to me at the time of the crisis responded with anger and even petulance. They willingly made grave decisions based on dangerous speculation.

Linda and George Lampe were friends living close to me in California when I became seriously ill. They had asked me to be godmother to their daughter, formalizing it in a ceremony, three weeks before I received a diagnosis of chemical sensitivity. Long time friends, - I had known Linda Moore for 25 years and George Lampe for 18 - I was the only person that they had allowed to watch their three young children for extended times while they went on vacation. Yet, Linda and George refused to witness for my sanity when the crisis came. Linda and George allowed me to exist without financial support in their vicinity, to be without any environmental supports in a critical time - even without a place to live - , to be denied oxygen to treat increasingly severe reactions and finally when I was completely broken physically to become prey to sociopaths.

Schools replaced principles with... "situational ethics," where principles were shown to be variable according to the demands of the moment. ...People with flexible principles reserve the right to betray their covenants. It’s that simple. The misery of modern life can be graphed in the rising incidence of people who exercise the right to betray each other, whether business associates, friends, or even family. Pragmatists like to keep their options open. When you live by principles, whatever semantic ambiguity they involve you in, there are clear boundaries to what you will allow, even when nobody is watching."

John Taylor Gatto
Underground History of American Education
[www.johntaylorgatto.com]
[Watch video]

"People who could be treated and have otherwise normal, productive lives have been robbed of such normalcy....'As people disappear from a visible lifestyle and adopt coping mechanisms such as living on porches and in RVs, they approach the divide between those with and without homes. When they slide over that divide there is no record of it and they disappear'" (Gibson, 2005).

Lourdes Salvator
American Chronicle
[ Read Article]

My situation highlights that today liberal-minded people can be taught to be irresponsible with the lives of their friends or family if they don't conform; a fact which has serious ramifications for our democracy.

"The erosion of civil rights are part of a continuum and we as a people need to be aware of every stage of that continuum so that we can guard ourselves against it."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"Environment, Health and Democracy"
Speech at U.C. Berkeley, March 3, 2005