In Robert Asprin’s “Incarnations of Immortality” series, the personification of Famine sits in a fast food restaurant with a smile on his face talking to one of the other incarnations. As he sits there, he says that the fast food industry is one of his favorites. He points out how fat the people are and how much they eat, but the best part, he says, is that they don’t even know that they are starving. The people are feasting on what is perceived to be abundance when in fact it does not contain the nutrients to sustain life. They are undernourished despite the fact that they are obese. That scene has duplicated itself in real life in several areas. We have created what appears to be an abundance of not only food but also of choice, information and social interaction. Walking into a grocery store, a person could be paralyzed by the number of choices available, but upon closer inspection, the choice is really between products that contain the same ingredients – corn, often in the form of corn syrup and soy in the form of soy oil. Delving deep into the matter, we know that choice is limited by the amount of money available to the chooser. In food, this means that many of the healthiest foods are not available to the people who need it most – the working poor. Money also decides where we are going to live, what we are going to drive and what type of health care we are going to have. We are rich when it comes to the appearance of choice, but the reality of choices does not live up to the appearances. We have so much information at our fingertips that this has been dubbed the information age. In fact, anyone can create information at any time and place it on the web for everyone else to find. There is so much information and misinformation available that it is hard to sift through what is true and what is made up. We drowned in information, and it is hard to find out what is the truth and who is reliable, especially when “news” channels misadvertise themselves as “fair and balanced.” Even when we are able to find a reliable source, it often gets disrupted by distractions that include cute cat videos and hits to the groin. With social media and texting blowing up, we should be entering the connection age. Unfortunately, it is the social media and the texting that ends up separating us. Visiting someone’s Facebook page is not visiting them. Texting someone is not talking to them. Human beings need to have interaction not interfacing. Without the face-to-face communication and the touch that often accompanies such visits, people become depressed and distant. While social media appears to increase social interaction, it generally decreases the social interaction that really matters. Intimacy goes down while self-disclosure goes up. When abundance is really scarcity, it is hard to see. We need to be aware of those situations that would deprive us of the things that we need. | |
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A central theme in solving several problems in our world is diversification. In fact, business recognizes diversification in its own system as a good hedge against financial destruction. People are told to have diversified portfolios, and several conglomerates run different businesses that hedge against economic downturn in anyone sector. Unfortunately, business and government do not recognize diversification in the production of foods or in economies of scale. Food is nature. As Michael Pollan says, “Monocultures don’t exist in nature.” Making the places where we grow our foods into monocultures invites the destruction of the crop or the animals without providing added benefits. The insects and diseases still destroy 30 percent of the crops while gaining the advantage of becoming resistant to the poisons used to stop them. Animals gathered together in closed areas with populations that reach into the thousands provide the best opportunity for the spread of disease. The wide use of antibiotics allows the diseases to become resistant and to pass that resistance on to other viruses and bacteria. In order for us to be truly successful, the food industry needs to become less industrialized. Organic farms can produce as much food as an industrial food manufacturing system. By providing a place for animals and plants to live in the ecosystems they are supposed to, farms can be safer, healthier for farmers and provide better results for the health of Americans. Or we can choose to not follow what business and nature deem as wisdom, continue on the monoculture farming practices of the industrial age and face the wanton destruction of our planet and our way of life. The way we connect to people is through the stories that we tell about ourselves. Watching the Next Food Network Star made that very clear. Each of the contestants has been told to tell the story of the food. Several of them have made the mistake of listing the ingredients and leaving out the story – they are no longer with the show. It is only with the story of the meal, the personal connection to why the chef chose to cook what he or she did, that the cooking show is able to transcend from a good cooking teacher to a show that people want to watch. It is the story telling aspect that makes the food and the chef come alive. Larry McMurtry wrote a letter about his heart attack to Michael Eisner who in turn shared his story. The power in Eisner’s book “Work in Progress” comes from these stories and the self-disclosure. (See “Work in Progress” review.) In our own lives, those that we want to be closest to should know our stories. It is always a risk to tell a personal story, but without the telling, we deny the other person a portion of ourselves.
In a market economy, the law of supply and demand is supposed to rein supreme. More supply equals lower prices; more demand equals higher prices. The problem with a market economy based health system is that there is only one supply so the demand is always high.
We only have one body. We cannot go down to the local department store and pick up a new body just to suit our needs. We have to make do with what we have. The health care system’s product is our health and our life. Again, there is only one of these. The only alternative for someone who is ill or has broken his or her bone is to allow the illness to continue untreated and to allow the broken bone to mend in a way that will restrict the body’s function for the rest of his or her life. Life is short. That phrase alone says volumes about the supply of life. There isn’t a lot of it, so when the health care system’s product is something as precious and short as life, in a market system, those who control the dissemination of healthcare can also control the prices. Very few people willingly choose to die, no matter how bad their lives seem. Everyone who values his or her own life will always be willing to pay any price to extend that life, to have a few more moments with their children, to continue to be able to experience love, sadness, joy and anger. Those who control the health care system know this to be true and charge accordingly. The finished flooring effort with mom, Grahms and me. I don’t consider myself to be a handy man by any stretch of the imagination. The number of projects that I have participated in, I can count on one hand and mostly involve my friend Glen in Alaska. So when mom decided that it was time to put a new floor in on Tuesday, I went to the source of all information – the internets. It takes a village to do more than just raise a child. We were reusing some Pergo Flooring that had been installed in another home, so I looked up a video that showed Pergo Flooring installation. It seemed easy enough. Mom put me in charge for some reason. Sherm cut the boards to the size that we needed and Grahms played wood flooring weight, which considering the size of my grandma was quite a challenge. We got the first row of boards put together easily enough, but the second set just did not go in like the video showed. Sherm offered some advice that seemed to work for him on a board, but I couldn’t get it to work for me. I decided to throw out everything I learned and do it the way that seemed most logical to me. We checked the boards for imperfections and removed any wood chips that may have created a problem. I then slid the top of the board into the bottom of a board that had already been placed on the padding. I then attached the side of the board to the flooring that was already in place by having Grahms stand on the line of boards about 6 feet away from the one I was installing. Mom and I lifted the board I was working on and the board it was attached to, so that we could achieve the needed angle for attachment. Aside from a few miscues, it worked out great. The floor was installed by 7 p.m. Mom gave me one of those high fives from the 80s where you grasp the other person’s hand – come on, mom, let’s at least move into the 90s. The next morning mom and Grahms cleaned the floor. The best part about the whole project was that it would not have been as successful if we didn’t have each person doing his or her job. It certainly would have taken longer and been much more frustrating. Oh, and now I know how to install reused Pergo Flooring. Grandma and I Grandma, mom and I got to talking about getting books for my nieces and nephew during our trip to Medford. I described how hard it was to find books that I felt was appropriate for their ages – 13, nine and nine. I thought that by confining the kids to nonfiction and young adult, the books they could choose would be mostly safe. There are some subjects in nonfiction that may be questionable, but at least what is written is the truth according to the writer and the publisher. I told them about “The Nine Lives of Chloe King.” (See my “Nine Lives of Chloe King” review here.) I said that it was like “Catcher in the Rye” and “Lolita,” and grandma shouts out “12 o’clock noon!” I am not sure what 12 o’clock noon has to do with anything that we were discussing. Grandma was laughing so hard that she couldn’t explain it, and mom said it was probably better not to ask. |
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