The Opioid “Crisis
or
Business As UsualBev Jo
This is dedicated to everyone who is suffering and those who have committed suicide from has being denied pain relief, and the few caring doctors who are being punished for helping people with pain.
The people with the power to stop deaths from opioids are making decisions that will kill more people, while bombarding the media with misleading propaganda.
What “opioid crisis”? From news reports to television dramas we are lectured about the “opioid crisis,” but this issue is actually about conning people into demanding even more government control of our lives. Why can’t we make our own choices? Why do people who otherwise do not want to be regulated and controlled by the US government not only eagerly obey, but also spread the propaganda? Why do they not consider that further restricting opioids will lead to more deaths from overdose and violence in the “drug wars”?
Do we want a society where people desperately needing relief from pain, including people who are dying, are denied the safest way to stop or lessen the pain? This is what people are demanding, agreeing to, and applauding.
Have you ever been in so much pain that you wanted to die, but were too afraid of what you’d heard about opioids that you would consider suicide rather than take Codeine or Vicodin, even if it’s what your doctors is recommending?
A friend took a drug (Cipro) that her doctor prescribed without any warnings about its often serious, permanent side effects, so she developed chronic, disabling pain. Her doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t help her. (I’ve been told by victims of Cipro and other Fluoroquinolones that they can cause terrible pain and even irreversible brain damage.) My friend was then prescribed Lorazapam, which also didn’t help, and then, after more months of crippling pain, and in spite of the “suicidal thoughts or actions label warning,” Lyrica. The next day, she killed herself. Instead of leaving her loved ones with the horror of finding her with a gunshot to the head, she chose a gentler death, which was a deliberate overdose of Percocet that she had taken from her partner’s prescription. But what if she had first tried opioids for the pain? I believe she would still be alive. Yet now she is part of the statistics proving how dangerous opioids are.
Opium has been used for thousands of years because it is the absolute best herb for pain control. What happened to make it so reviled and feared that people would rather die than take it? Even if my friend had taken enough opioids to become dependent, wouldn’t that be better than her being dead? (I can only hope that before she died she had a moment of feeling the peace, joy, and safety that opioids can give.)
Something is very wrong, and that’s what I want to explore and counter in this article.
So What Is Going On?
A few years ago, friend in chronic pain from Lyme disease predicted a media campaign about the invented “opioid epidemic” and speculated about the motive. She felt money was behind it, and I agree. Soon, cannabis started being legalized for “recreational” use and the television news magazine, 60 Minutes, did a report about how cannabis is being grown on an “industrial” scale by corporations. Suddenly, the media was full of stories vilifying opioids and telling people that cannabis was the safe alternative — except that cannabis rarely helps against pain that way that opioids do, and many people react very badly to cannabis (with severe Post Traumatic Stress and other symptoms immediately and obvious brain damage with longer use.) Considering that the number of cannabis users has greatly increased, you would expect some reports about the glaring problems that many of us see with friends after longtime use, but it’s not happening. Meanwhile, more toxic and less effective “painkillers” are also being pushed by the medical system.
What’s been more of a surprise is how the media has been carrying the same story line about the terrible dangers of opioids to make sure that people not only readily believe the hype but start spreading it to others and police anyone who refuses to agree. Even people who do not trust the medicine-for-profit system seem to have given up their skepticism when it comes to propaganda against opioids. It’s as if they have given up rational thinking. But why?
Part of the problem is that too many people in the US expect that the government will take care of them and have come to believe that those in power know best. I would hope that would end once we got an openly nazi administration, but instead, people who hate the government actually approve of recent plans to execute people who make opioids available. (I’m not seeing similar suggestions to execute the manufacturers and distributors of tobacco and alcohol, which continue to be pushed throughout the media.)
Pain, Lies, Profit, and Obedience
It’s been interesting to see how this fear campaign against opioids has developed, considering that when I was little, babies were given opium in the form of over-the-counter Paregoric.
First, people are “educated” about the increasing overdose deaths “caused” by opioids. I had never seen a news report about how many of these deaths are actually deliberate suicides until recently: http://wypr.org/post/how-many-opioid-overdoses-are-suicides
(AUDIE CORNISH: This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, WBUR and Kaiser Health News.
“[Based on the literature that’s available] it looks like it’s anywhere between 25 and 45 percent of deaths by overdose that may be actual suicides,” says Dr. Maria Oquendo, immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association.
Oquendo points to one study of overdoses from prescription opioids that found 54 percent were unintentional. The rest were either suicide attempts or undetermined.
Several large studies show an increased risk of suicide among drug users addicted to opioids, especially women. In a study of 5 million veterans, women were eight times as likely as others to be at risk for suicide, while men faced a twofold risk.
The opioid epidemic is occurring at the same time suicides have hit a 30-year high, but Oquendo says few doctors look for a connection.
“They are not monitoring it,” says Oquendo, who chairs the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “They are probably not assessing it in the kinds of depths they would need to prevent some of the deaths.”)
Then people are taught about the increasing numbers of opioid addicts, without mention of how many of these “addicts” are people needing opioids for pain control. As our environment becomes increasing toxic and people have to work in harmful conditions in order to just survive, more people need relief from pain. But now doctors are too afraid to keep prescribing what they know works best for their patients because they will lose their licenses and be imprisoned. Is it any surprise that many people turn to illegal opioids, like heroin? (Heroin, by the way, was a medical invention.) Then more die because they have no idea what is in the illegal drugs. Fentanyl is now being blamed as a toxic additive, even though it’s an opioid which is used for medical procedures like colonoscopies and prescribed for pain relief.
The answer to this dilemma is obvious, so why are so few saying it?
I try to find the truth about a subject by searching for what is most hyped in the media. There are daily misleading reports on opioids, like the recent medical “study” announcing that they only just discovered that opioids actually don’t work or stop working, even though opioids have been known for thousands of years to be the best medication for pain relief. Only at the end of this report do they admit that the actual problem is people building tolerance, as if that wasn’t already common knowledge about opioids. Opioids don’t stop working — it’s just that more are needed to work.
“But what about ‘addicts’ just taking opioids for pleasure?” Well, so what? Alcohol and tobacco are legal, though both harm the lives of other people without consent, whether it’s babies and children forced to breathe their parents’ carcinogenic, toxic smoke or people killed by violence and accidents fueled by alcohol. Meanwhile, cannabis is increasingly being legalized, which is also affecting other people’s health, yet there is a massive media campaign saying that stories of brain damage are myth and rarely is it mentioned that cannabis smoke is twice as toxic as tobacco smoke. Cannabis has a history of being trendy and therefore is promoted by many people based on the belief that it’s a radical and harmless drug. It was repeatedly pushed on me as a teenager, and I still am being told to use it decades later, (including by a therapist), no matter how much I say it’s harmful to me and that I hate it.
Though I had a family that was full of alcoholics, I never saw the brain damage I have seen with friends who have been long-term or even short term cannabis users. (A friend said she’d started taking it daily for three years and now her memory is terrible). When I was 17, I noticed, like other friends also have said, that cannabis dulled our thinking and memory. I had never even bought any, and only used it occasionally. The effect of cannabis is so glaring that I can often recognize daily users by behavior, including in letters, like when three friends had the exact same style of missing words and incomplete sentences such as I’d never seen in other letters. Plus, I saw a bizarre kind of megalomania where they believe they are far more knowledgeable than other people even when they aren’t making sense. I asked each friend if they used cannabis, and they said “yes,” and “as often as possible.”) But if you dare say cannabis causes brain damage that seems irreversible, expect ridicule and insults, including being told you are boring.
A dear friend who has been in severe chronic pain for years, which she controlled with opioids and cannabis, was suddenly forced by her medical insurance company into required urine testing. (Why must ill or injured people be told to accept the humiliation of urine tests, which are not required for other prescription drugs?) She had to choose between which drug she was allowed so she chose cannabis, but gave up the Norco/hydrocodone (opioid). Her personality changed dramatically to where she no longer calls or writes, and seeing her in person is impossible, because after a planned visit would be scheduled, she wouldn’t respond, even to cancel. The last I knew was that she was suicidally depressed and homebound.
Still, I am not suggesting cannabis be banned. I am recommending that NO herb or drug be banned (other than those that have no value except for profiting the medical industry.) Make everything that is used for pain or health or pleasure (pleasure improves health, physically and psychologically) available and affordable without prescription, but with the dosage and all side effects and warnings meticulously described (which is not done now with most pharmaceutical drugs).
If this seems shocking, consider how things are now in the US. The US government commits terrorist environmental assaults on other countries in their “war on drugs,” with aerial herbicide spraying that contaminates air, land and water, poisoning countless people, other animals, and plants, causing chronic illness and death. (The birth defects and cancer, etc. from US poisoning of Viet Nam by herbicides decades ago still continues.) Meanwhile, in the US, enormous numbers of people are injured, murdered, and imprisoned by this governmental drug war that targets the most oppressed communities. Everyone is affected by the violence — it’s not unusual to hear drug-related gunshots every night where I live. Bullets go right through walls, killing people. Since most of what happens in the US is based on exploitation and profit, why don’t people explore the reasons for the “drug wars” instead of just accepting them without question? What easier way is there to stop this horror than to legalize and make a safe version of the drugs be available, which would put dealers and traffickers out of business?
Why not let people decide for themselves what health decisions they want to make?
Part of the reason people don’t question authority (in spite of bumper stickers) is the belief that the government knows best even when we know that is not true. The US was founded on genocide and slavery, and US culture is steeped in a cold, punitive, puritanical way of thinking and treating people. Even recreation for many people consists of punishing regimens and nutrient starvation that harms the health in the guise of being good for health. I’ve been chronically ill since 1981, but am still pressured to do more than I should and am told it will be good for me. I have seen women who are dying of cancer doing grueling hikes that leave other women gasping for breath. They are using up the very Ch’i/life force that they could use to recover.
Consider the horrified reaction to my saying “so what” if people want to use drugs for pleasure, even though that is precisely why people drink alcohol. Also, notice the classist and racist biases about which drugs are accepted for pleasure and even status (expensive “fine wines,” liqueurs, cocaine, etc.) and which are reviled (cheap alcohol, heroin, crack cocaine, etc.) Another aspect of the racism is how sacred herbs and mushrooms, such as peyote and psilocybin and coca of First Nations people, as well as lesser-known herbs, are all banned. How dare the puritanical WASPs who run the US deprive people of their culture?
Health
Another question is, what is better for people and the world? Opioids don’t just mask pain, but actually help heal pain. They also help people sleep, which helps recovery from injury and illness. Opioids help prevent macular degeneration, which is an increasing cause of blindness because of the protective ozone layer disappearing. Opioids help control coughing, dysentery. and diarrhea, which can save lives. Opioids also help stop beginning flus and colds as well as making them end more quickly, which means they could help people survive some of the serious illnesses, such as West Nile Virus.
Opioids also aren’t just good for physical pain, but for mental and emotional pain. We know they are supposed to make people “high” and happy, and that’s part of why we are taught they are evil. But what if opioids help people who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder not kill themselves or they help people get off anti-depressants? Addictive? Benzodiazepines and anti-depressants are extremely addictive. Three of my friends cannot stop the anti-depressants doctors prescribed for them without warning them because when they try, they have excruciating physical as well as excruciating mental and emotional pain. Could careful use of opioids have helped them heal from trauma without becoming addicted to anti-depressants? But what if they became addicted to opioids instead? Well, what if people were able to take as much as they needed without fear of being denied what is helping them?
The “opioid crisis” has become a popular topic whenever people meet and talk, yet I’ve rarely heard anyone question the basic premise. Can these people not consider that they too may be in terrible pain some day and be denied opioids? Do they really trust the government to know best for them when other governmental decisions against our wills have been so harmful? Even ephedra, which is the best herb I know of for treating congestion from colds and flus has been banned, though the “dangerous” effects are no more than from drinking too much coffee or tea. What are people afraid of if we have the choice to use whatever herbs or drugs we want?
People are trusted to do many dangerous things, including driving cars. So why are we being treated as children who need to be supervised and controlled when it comes to herb and drug choices? Who is the Big Daddy to make such personal decisions about our lives, including if we deserve to live in pain or not? Generally, many previous laws restricting our lives, including criminalizing our choices about who we love, whether interracial or same sex marriages, have been extremely destructive. Being forbidden to know if some of our food has toxic ingredients is another and it’s always about corporations and profit.
Shall We Debate Some of the Common Myths?
1. There is an epidemic of people dying from taking opioids.
Which opioids? If they are prescription opioids, then the deaths are likely deliberate suicide, or from people mixing drugs/alcohol because their doctor isn’t accounting for increased tolerance from chronic pain. If people are buying illegal opioids and have no idea what is in them or the dosage, then of course people will die. Isn’t denying people access to safe opioids what is actually killing people?
2. The “opioid epidemic” is doctors’ fault for over-prescribing.
Are you in chronic pain? Have you ever used opioids? Have you ever known people helped by them? Do you know people who are being denied opioids by their doctors, though their pain could be stopped and they could re-gain some of their former life? Most doctors now refuse to prescribe opioids no matter how much pain people are in.And what about the kind, competent doctors who are in prison with their medical licenses taken away because they continued to prescribe what people needed in spite of the changing punitive, cruel attitudes?3. Some people take opioids just for fun.
How do you know? If someone is in pain, even if it’s emotional or mental, doesn’t relief from that pain feel like fun or pleasure? What’s wrong with that and who has the right to determine whether someone else should have access to pain relief? Certainly relief from physical pain feels pleasurable.
And if they do, do they still deserve to die, like a friend of mine who died from contaminated heroine when in her twenties
4. Doctors can tell who really needs opioids.
No, they can’t. I’ve heard horror stories from friends about loved ones with broken bones or even dying being denied opioids.
Recently, a friend who is in her sixties and has severe chronic pain, osteoarthritis, and Lyme disease, saw the doctor who prescribes Tramadol for her, which is a very low level weak opioid. He didn’t take her blood pressure or ask how she was, but began yelling at her that she would be well if she just exercised more and ate more vegetables. He didn’t ask how much exercise she gets or what she ate or he would have found out that in spite of her severe pain, she does hard physical work six days a week and eats as well as she can. (By the way, she had looked up his prescribing history and saw that he gets $60,000 a year just from kick-backs from non-opioid drugs from pharmaceutical companies.) She wasn’t even asking for an increase in the Tramadol, although that is exactly what she needs as her pain level and tolerance increases and illness progresses. This cruel doctor is not unusual and from his Yelp reviews, he frequently treats patients like this.
Doctors also rarely give accurate information when they do prescribe opioids. If they let people know the time frame for when dependency is likely to start and what beginning withdrawal feels like and how long people need to take breaks to not be dependent, that would help tremendously, but they rarely do this. In fact, the UCSF pain clinic actually told a friend who asked how to deal with withdrawal after longtime prescription opioid use to “just eat chocolate.” Seriously?
What doctors do need to be held accountable for is how their irrational rules force people to take more opioids than they need and prevent people from lessening their dosage. A friend wrote:
I agree with this entire article. I live with chronic pain and have been lucky enough to finally find a doctor willing to prescribe me what I want at a pain clinic. But I am completely at their mercy, because I have to pee test to make sure I’m “taking my meds as prescribed.” So if I have a good week, and don’t take as many, I’m at risk for being flagged for diversion. When I don’t need them I feel too high, but have to take anyway just to please the doctor. It seems counter-intuitive to ask me to get high in order to continue to get my meds…
I feel for people who can’t get meds they need at all. I’ve been in that position. Friends who desperately need pain meds have even asked to buy them from me. I wouldn’t accept money but I am unable to help without risking my own care. It’s sad, I understand why people in pain turn to illegal drugs.
5. But people will become addicted if anyone can get opioids.
Because opioids can cause physical and emotional dependence, people who take opioids need to be aware of this if they don’t take breaks, but that does not make someone an addict. A friend with severe chronic pain says, “if your body needs opioids for pain and then adjusts to their presence, you can become dependent on them and it’s more difficult to function without them since it’s very hard living with pain. An addict has no need for the opioids or perhaps once did but started using them recreationally. Meanwhile, many people need to continue taking opioids at the dose they need, like people do with many other medications.”
6. It’s harmful for people to be dependent/addicted.
Not necessarily, if they have access to what they need and if the opioids are clean and not adulterated with toxic drugs. Some people are dependent on insulin or other drugs for survival. Pure opioids are far less toxic than most pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is that the punishing medical system makes it almost impossible to get pure opioids because acetaminophen (toxic to the kidneys and liver) or toxic ibuprofen are added to most prescribed opioids. This is one of the things that needs to be stopped if the medical system actually cares about people’s health. Acetaminophen can easily be bought, so the only reason it’s added to opioids is to prevent people from taking “too much,” with their punishment being kidney or liver failure and sometimes death. (What happened to “First do no harm…?)
7. If everyone had access to opioids, the US would become a lawless country and there would be more criminals.
Seriously? The opposite is true. Have you not seen the crime rate because of drugs in the US?
The corporations want the most oppressed people to be in prison in order to have legal slave labor. That’s part of why prisons have been privatized to be for profit.
And don’t ignore the fact that the government colludes with drug traffickers and has used drugs to control and imprison oppressed populations.
All this is even more reason to let people make their own decisions.
8. Addicts are dangerous to society.
Some people who are being denied the pain relief they need can become violent and dangerous. That’s true even for other animals in pain. Longtime opioid users are among gentlest, kindest and most responsible and functional people I know.
- Opioids cause people to become too passive.That’s a problem in such a violent society? They aren’t passive compared to cannabis users.
10. People will just lie around and not work.Now there is the real issue. People should all be forced to work for the corporations that are destroying the world, no matter how much they are in pain and suffering? Don’t dare deny the rich more money.Notice how this argument hasn’t stopped cannabis or alcohol legalization.Actually, relief from pain increases people’s ability to be active, and certainly opioids do not interfere with ability to think and write.
11. People build tolerance to opioids.That’s true and most doctors ignore that. Again, let people choose what they need.12. Eventually, if the dose is increased, they don’t work as well.That also can be true, so be careful how much you take. Again, give people all the information, making it specific about what to expect with dosage and time frames, and not just be a vague patronizing lecture, and let them decide. In countries where opioids are legal, most people self-regulate dosage. Even if some people make bad decisions, at least those who need relief from pain can get it. No one is talking about banning alcohol or tobacco because of the problems with them, so why opioids?
13. People on opioids should be put in rehab.
Should everyone who uses tobacco or alcohol also be put in rehab? Actually, the shaming and forcing people into rehab causes more deaths. People stop opioids, but are still in pain. So they start again, but aren’t aware that their tolerance level has lessened and so they take the amount they last took, which then can be an overdose. If they weren’t in the cycle of use, shame, quitting, and use, far less would die. A large part of this is because of the “experts” deciding to cut off access to opioids.
Many people deal with this by taking other drugs, which is not their first choice. Some use alcohol as well, which is extremely dangerous. Many of the famous people who have died from drugs actually died from alcohol or a combination of other drugs, like anti-depressants, with alcohol. The media often confuses the drugs involved and assumptions are made
How many people would support easy access to opioids if some of their beloved media stars could still be alive? I had believed that the rich could get pure, unadulterated opioids, but Prince died from “counterfeit Vicodin combined with Fentanyl.” It’s likely that Amy Winehouse would be still alive also, but, like so many others, including Janis Joplin, resorted to combining opioids with alcohol. Being a musician/artist/actor, like Prince often meant being expected to perform with excruciating injuries. Grueling schedules prevent many from recovering. Michael Jackson relied on Propofol to sleep but also was taking benzodiazepines. Those who died from benzodiazepine combinations like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe might still be alive if it wasn’t so much easier to get prescriptions for those drugs than for opioids. For many, the pressures of fame alone is overwhelming. And then the longtime “addicts” who died from liver and kidney failure, like Billie Holiday and Esther Phillips, probably would not have died if they had had access to clean instead of contaminated heroin. (A doctor I know who worked in an ER said the healthiest people she met were heroin dealers, presumably because they had access to the cleanest heroin.) Meanwhile, so many famous people die from complications from smoking, but that is less publicized and warned about since most films still are relentlessly pushing it.
Imagine all the beloved famous people who might still be alive if opioids were legal without prescription and affordable. What music, writing, creativity has the world lost as a result of these unnecessary deaths?
14. People’s personalities change when they take opioids.
Yes, they can be nicer to be around. Seriously, that isn’t necessarily bad. For many, it’s coming back to who they used to be before having disabling pain. Many are able to do things they had given up being able to do years ago, from hiking and dancing to enjoying being with friends to writing, painting, sculpting, etc. (Other drugs prescribed for “pain relief” can interfere with thinking clearly.)
A friend describes feeling her heart opening and feeling more love towards others. My mother had been bitter, angry, and almost impossible to be around. After she was prescribed morphine, she did change. She became like the person I had known before she was so sick and in so much pain. For the first time in decades, I could have conversations with her and she became more kind and loving. I felt like I finally had my mother back before she died. (She finally died from sepsis after doctors destroyed her kidneys with the twelve toxic and unnecessary drugs they had prescribed to her. I pleaded with her to stop – her next door neighbor experienced the same thing, and her kidneys recovered a year after she stopped the doctors’ drugs. But my mother thought doctors were like god and always knew best, even after they admitted how their drugs had harmed her and after she saw so many friends die from cancer “treatments.”)
15. What about the people who are denied access to clean needles who get HIV or hepatitis and die, or spread them to other people?
That is precisely why affordable access to opioids would solve this and protect everyone.
Sensible and Lifesaving Solutions
The “unthinkable” is actually happening in other countries. Why not lessen deaths and HIV infection by doing what Switzerland and Portugal has done? Make all opioids legal without prescription and be affordable, and no one will die other than those who are choosing deliberate suicide. No more drug wars in other countries with the US destroying their environment with poison and no more drug wars in our cities. No more overdoses because people will know exactly what they are taking. And no more overdoses because people are shamed into rehab and then start again and aren’t careful to lower the dose.
Again, think with compassion about whether anyone should continue to be deprived of pain relief or be in constant fear they will be as more doctors are pressured to stop prescribing opioids. Isn’t chronic or terminal pain hard enough to deal with?
http://fortune.com/2017/09/19/jeff-sessions-opioid-epidemic-legalize-all-drugs/
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/bill-bogart/to-confront-the-opioid-crisis_b_15234080.html
Please help us protect our Oakland parks and prevent wildfire.
We have until
5:00 p.m. on December 12, 2019 to send comments to:arobinsonpinon@oaklandca.gov
The simplest choice is to vote for NO Project.
Dec. 2019 My response to the Oakland Vegetation Management Plan
I vote for the option of “No Project.”
The most disturbing part of your plan is that it introduces pesticides into the parks and open spaces where it is now banned. This will cause more cancer and chronic illness in humans as well as killing animals, polluting the earth, air, water. Saying it will be “limited” is not good enough. There is no rational reason to do this other than for money.
You must know that Marin parks and Open Spaces, including the Marin Municipal Water District, which manages most of Mt. Tamalpais, has stopped all pesticide use so you could also. (The last group who insisted fragile Ring Mountain in Marin had to be sprayed were stopped by law, and the brush cutters used instead worked perfectly.) Again, I am left wondering how much money from the poison manufacturers like Monsanto influence your decisions.
The main focus is about fire prevention, but this plan is more likely to cause catastrophic fire than prevent it.
Most fire has one cause: Man — whether it’s PG&E, avoidable accidents (fireworks, barbecue, cigarettes, etc.) or deliberate arson. (Your plan opens the parks in ways that make them far more welcoming to arsonists than a closed, dense, dark forest full of poison oak and blackberry thorns.) Local news stations reported that PG&E caused at least 7 of the recent major fires, and over 2000 other ignitions. The CPUC determined that PG& E was responsible for the most catastrophic fire in California history. The documentary on PBS by Frontline, actually shows PG&E starting the Paradise fire: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/fire-in-paradise/.
Every branch or limb cut, every shrub or vine or tree killed, increases the heat and dryness and eliminates moisture from the parks and the earth. I’m not even going to refer to “carbon sequestering” or saving the “canopy” because those divert from the real issue, which is that the parks need to be left alone, to grow as dark and dense and moist as possible, which they can do without human harassment. There is no need to spend money on making our parks more in danger from fire. If we eliminate the money to be made from killing the trees and opening up the parks, then there is no rational reason for most of this plan.
Wind is the major fire problem besides heat and dryness. Wind increases the dryness that leads to fire and spreads fire. So why on earth do most agencies’ plans want to open our parks to more wind? Recommending thinning “mature pine or cypress stands to reach an average 30-foot horizontal spacing” is an enormous distance and makes no sense. The so-called “defensible space” recommendations also increase fire risk. There is absolutely no reason to prune or “limb” or make space between trees by “thinning” unless you want to increase wind and thereby increase fires, especially since every cut on a tree opens it to disease. Trees also don’t compete for water and resources, but work together. It’s been documented that if one tree needs help, the nearby trees try to provide the moisture, food, etc. Why on earth do humans think they know better than the trees and other plants how want to live? Haven’t humans done enough irreparable damage to the Oakland hills forests, once the tallest in the world?
The 1991 firestorm was caused by humans when the original grass fire was not fully put so the next day firefighters inadvertently kicked up embers. The wooden houses caught fire quickly while the streets acted as wind tunnels, spreading the fire, but still, it did not go into the parks. Yet trees are blamed.
Meanwhile, Oakland has had devastating fires in the flatlands and other parts of the city far from parks and maligned trees. The Ghost Ship fire is one example, so why are trees targeted in this enormous money-making plan, when there has been no fires in our parks in all these years?
The revised document looks like a patchwork that is missing awareness of the connection with nature that make up our parks. One section refers to wanting to increase rare species of plants and animals, while another section is about eliminating them. You can’t so damage a forest and expect to still have diverse animal and plant habitat.
If you want to see what a healthy, more natural forest looks like, go to Muir Woods. It’s relatively tiny, but it has the rare Spotted Owl, Pileated Woodpeckers, Barred Owls, Giant Pacific Salamanders, etc. and incredibly rare wildflowers. You can see that the ground is covered with what would be considered a fire hazard elsewhere, but is actually the opposite. It’s a shambles of fallen trees and debris with signs saying to not remove a single twig because the birds need them.
Another, very different forest example is on EBMUD land in Moraga, by a creek and reservoir. It’s not natural at all, but has become a wildlife sanctuary because of how EBMUD maintains it. They allow dead trees to stand so the acorn woodpeckers can use them as granary trees and other birds nest and hunt in them. They allow Poison Oak to climb over 30 feet into the Monterey Pines. (In spite of that being called a “fire ladder,” it’s the opposite, because living plants do not easily burn and also limit wind.) They allow the beautiful native Monterey Pines (yes, they are native) to continue so that the new baby trees grow to replace the old trees. Why on earth kill them when they enrich the soil like no other tree, bring down fog drip, and feed so many animals? (This is a wonderful place to see unusual bird species as well as bobcats and coyotes.)
There are only a few Eucalypts, who are large and old, proving that they do not easily spread. They provide ideal nesting for large raptors because they are safer for the fledglings to learn to fly in than the shorter, denser oaks and bays. There is an amazing variety of birds, but I have also seen three rare species of snakes, including the Alameda Whipsnake, who was in a particularly dark dense part of the forest, and not what the Oakland Veg. M recommends. You say you’d like the Dusky-Footed Woodrats to return, but do you know they need a dense forest with fallen branches and twigs to build their enormous nests (some taller than humans) that have chambers where other species, including some endangered, live? I’ve never seen as many Woodrat nests as at this Moraga site. (I can show anyone who wants to see fifty of them in a short walk.) This site also has the Western Pond Turtles that the OVM plan wants.
If the OVM team truly wants the Special-Status Animal Species you mention, like Golden Eagles and White-tailed Kites (who are also at the Moraga EBMUD site), then don’t remove any trees. Those animals need to have decent habitat, which means not eliminating herbs like Fennel (which is edible to humans, as well as medicinal), which feeds small birds and rodents, who then would feed the raptors and other predators. Fennel also feeds beautiful Anise Swallowtails, so why are they targeted other than being “non-native”?
In spite of Cotoneaster’s red berries feeding many bird species, including Cedar Waxwings, in your plan, Cotoneaster is said to be “thought capable of invading intact ecosystems, where it competes with native vegetation for water, nutrient, and light resources.” Sorry, but did the person who wrote that ever see one? They are quite short, barely qualify as a tree, do not spread, and I have only ever seen them in already very disturbed environments and not wilderness parks. Considering how many native animals they feed, how are they a problem? But it’s like this with all the targeted plants, such as the incredibly beautiful flowering and edible brassicas, mustard and radish. How are highly flammable dead grasses better than these flowers who maintain moisture and stay green throughout the dry season, and also provide shelter for and feed animals? I’ve seen rare long-tailed weasels playing in them. Why kill impressive Pampas grass that helps prevent erosion? Or the artichoke relative, Cardoon, who is both beautiful, with large electric blue flowers, but also edible, and sold in gourmet produce stores? Yellow Star Thistle blooms brilliant color when all else is dead and dry, providing significant nectar for honeybees, yet is extremely hated. What do you want instead, bare earth? (These plants are simply targeted because they are not native and are called “trash” by nativists.)
Mulching isn’t an improvement when it’s chipped trees that can spontaneously combust, and mulching also eliminates native bees who need bare ground to nest. As honeybees are killed by pesticides, we might soon need those native bees for pollination. This is the problem when focusing only on one plant to kill alters the entire eco-system.
The list of “invasive” plants in the plan is bizarre because it includes trees and other plants that aren’t even in this area outside of a Botanical Garden and if they did appear magically, would not spread at all.
The plan itself says: “researchers in Marin County, California, were unable to burn a mature, uncut broom stand, and a young uncut stand had only spotty combustion” (Odion and Haubensak 2002). So why target broom species? They bloom bright yellow in the dark of winter and have the most delicious scent imaginable. Even more importantly, they fill in and cover highly flammable dry, dead grasses, and when the trees return, the broom fades. They are ideal in helping move grassland to forest.
But instead, “The Weed Worker’s Handbook” in your plan recommends putting poison on every plant listed to kill what is considered a problem, but poison is the problem, contaminating the earth, water, air, killing animals and unintended plants. And pesticides kill humans, no matter how it’s applied. Yet your concern is less “about the potential to affect non-target vegetation and/or wildlife,” and more about “public concern regarding potential health impacts from herbicide use.”
You can say that the poisons are to be safely applied by a licensed professional, but that does not stop the harm it does. If you have ever seen a California Newt dying an excruciating death after walking through a recently sprayed area, you wouldn’t be so casual. We know that glyphosate (which is already in all our bodies) and other poisons kill humans too. There is no safe way to use it, no safe dose, and it also pollutes where it’s manufactured. How about if the next people who die from it are those who order the spraying, rather than the workers? Plus, how do we trust any agency when I saw poison illegally sprayed from an unmarked container in an EBRP? (And no, saying they are just “dabbing” or otherwise applying it does not reassure me.) Also, how can we trust anyone who uses such shockingly patronizing misinformation and propaganda as at this influential site? https://www.cal-ipc.org/…/Cal_IPC_Symposium_2019_Chris_McDo…
Of course they never answer how or why there is any reason to use the poisons — or where the water goes that they recommend washing off the clothes, equipment, etc. Not one more death or case of chronic illness justifies these poisons. But this con will convince people to keep exposing themselves.
Part of what makes me skeptical of intent are the myriad contradictions, like the bizarre piles of dead branches often left lying around in park lands, even while living trees are killed as “fire hazards.” The “masticators” and other heavy machinery that damages the earth are recommended to kill plants yet actually leave shredded branches that are extremely flammable, but no one notices?
Most people don’t realize that the European invaders drastically altered California weather — from eliminating most of the once extensive inland lake (where birds still migrate) which affects the delta and the Sierra snow pack (which is likely why the Sequoiadendrons are suffering), to clearcutting what had once been the largest estuary Oak forest in the world in Oakland (hence the name), to clearcutting the largest Redwoods in the world in the Oakland hills. Those Redwoods would have brought down massive fog drip, filling the creeks to the bay. Parts of Oakland would have been wet year round. The way they destroyed the earth with their machinery permanently altered the land, killing the rare plants that OVM wants to return. But people can learn from this, knowing that continuing to kill trees and other plants will continue damaging the land. You can see in Marin, on Mt. Tamalpais, that the logging there did not do the same damage. There is a wonderful variety of rare wildflowers still growing under the baby (but now huge) Redwoods. They also have the exquisite Douglas Fir that can grow taller than Redwoods and together they bring water down from the fog. (There was a small trail in Redwood Park in Oakland that had some beautiful rare wildflowers, but EBRPD mistakenly ordered everything cut to the ground, apologized, and then brought in heavy machinery that destroyed what was left. It’s so easy for a supposed mistake to have permanent consequences. Now, if we want to see those rare wildflowers, we have to travel to another county.)
Lauding the “Friends of Sausal Creek” as a “stewardship group active in vegetation management efforts in Dimond Canyon Park” does not inspire confidence when they killed 40 large, healthy Redwoods for no rational reason. (I was told the trees’ crime was being from Crescent City, whatever that means.) Oakland is so barren and treeless, yet this group was allowed to do this? And they also advocate a massive amount of pesticide spraying in their nativist fanaticism, contaminating the land and creek to the bay. Why haven’t they been stopped? Promoting them and other nativist groups while completely ignoring the people and organizations who have been working to protect our parks shows disturbing bias. (Members of some of those nativist “steward” groups have advocated that the OVM plan match the proposal in the FEMA EIS, which the city was already sued over, and lost, by the Hills Conservation Network.)
So why not name and recommend people and groups who have been working for years to protect our parks — like Save the East Bay Hills (who submitted extensive comments that don’t seem to have been mentioned in the revised draft) and East Bay Pesticide Alert (who provided toxicology and alternatives to city officials and involved agencies back in January 2005). Our Coalition to Defend East Bay Forests included members injured and disabled by pesticide poisoning, and some have attended all the meetings of the last 2-1/2 years for this plan and consistently opposed the use of pesticide).
So why not name and recommend the people and groups who have been working for years to protect our parks — like Save the East Bay Hills (who submitted extensive comments that don’t seem to have been mentioned in the revised draft), our Coalition to Defend East Bay Forests (members include people injured and disabled by pesticide poisoning, and some have attended all the meetings of the last 2-1/2 years for this plan and consistently opposed the use of pesticides), East Bay Pesticide Alert (who provided toxicology and alternatives to city officials and involved agencies back in January 2005).
You could have balanced your extensive citations of Cal-IPC with alternative perspectives, such as by David Theodoropoulos, who debunked ‘Invasion Biology’ as a pseudo-science, but which Cal-IPC’s entire existence is based on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1i3RP7eDFc
And instead of citing Cal-IPC’s “Weed Workers’ Handbook,” where are the alternatives to pesticides used by Tao Orion, a longtime worker in the field of “restoration,” which Cal-IPC pushes along with pesticide use. And where is there mention of Dave Maloney, retired Oakland firefighter, former Chief of Fire Prevention at the U.S. Army Base in Oakland, and member of the Oakland-Berkeley Mayor’s Firestorm Task Force, who wrote “The Next Major Fire in the East Bay Hills”? https://milliontrees.me/2016/03/25/the-next-major-fire-in-the-east-bay-hills/
Another serious environmental worry listed in your plan is the acknowledgement that the machinery you’re planning to use can cause fires and poison the parks: “Service and fuel heavy equipment only in areas that will not allow grease, oil, fuel, or other hazardous materials to pass into streams or retained vegetation; Remove from the site and properly dispose of all refuse, litter, trash, and non-vegetative debris resulting from vegetation treatment operations; Ensure that hazardous materials spill kits are available on all heavy equipment.” How about not risking any of this?
This is personal to me because your plan would destroy most of what makes these parks special. In a small section of Joaquin Miller park, Monterey Pines enrich the otherwise clay soil and so there is an amazing variety of mushrooms. The Bay Area Mycological Society has events to show the over 40 species in a 20 minute stroll. It’s an excellent way to learn species without having to drive hours to other counties. This is the same area that a local conservation biology group teaches people how to find and see two native scorpion species with UV lights. Who even knew Oakland had these interesting little animals? But it won’t take much to destroy this habitat. Just kill the pines and open the forest to wind and increasingly deadly sun, followed by fire.
Your plan also ignores that the various Oak species are ill and dying. Bay trees might be next. Redwoods are suffering because of lack of rain and adequate fog drip and they need every bit of tree companionship they can get in order to survive. The June issue of National Geographic (“Talking Trees” by Daisy Chung and Ryan Williams, p. 26), describes how tree species help each other survive. I’ve wondered if the Oaks with Sudden Oak Death who are predicted to be dead in a few decades could be helped to heal in this way. But the trees need to be as close as possible for the mycorrozial fungi to connect and help them. The plan to isolate and separate trees is not how they naturally grow, and instead weakens them, as well as drying out and heating the earth. Redwoods who need to conserve as much moisture as possible especially suffer.
Wouldn’t it make sense to diversify our forests so we aren’t without trees as disease spreads and heat increases? We have several species, native and not, perfectly suited to this changing environment. Native Douglas Fir live for hundreds of years and are incredibly disease and pest resistant, and do well in both hot and cold environments. The Grey Pine/Pinus Sabiniana who are east of Oakland could also be planted here. But we already have extremely drought tolerant and disease resistant Acacia species (including the gorgeous Acacia delbata) and several Eucalyptus species. (In terms of fire risk, I could demonstrate trying to set fire to Euc leaves or bark here to show you how difficult that is). When older, Eucalyptus trunks are like steel, and they are perfect windbreaks. (Many people don’t know that they were planted specifically as windbreaks on properties out in the open, and not just for lumber.)
Why not commit to not killing another tree and actually talking with us about how to truly prevent fires while enriching our parks, instead of continuing on this destructive path?
You describe in detail about working around some of the more vulnerable animals species, including relocating them, but you should know that that is likely to kill them. Animals have a complex relationship with the trees and other plants and animals and the territories they have fought to win. (Again, mistakes inevitably happen. I tried working with Audubon to save the Burrowing Owls in Berkeley, only to see that those in charge knew nothing about the birds and so inadvertently destroyed their habitat, driving the owls away. They apologized, but continued doing more damage.)
Your plan refers to leaving trunks of killed trees to prevent hillsides collapsing but that is another disaster in the making. The trees hold hillsides up, as do the beautiful, evocative, but hated broom. As people lose their homes to landslides, being told the cause was fire prevention will be small comfort. Go along Skyline and in Montclair to see houses and hillsides coming down after Eucalyptus and other trees have been killed. (Also, so many trees have been killed in the Oakland hills that much of the privacy people moved there for is disappearing.)
We need every tree we can get as our climate continues to heat. The difference in how it feels on a very hot day to be on an Oakland street versus under the trees in our parks is dramatic and tens of degrees difference.
Most parts of the US want more trees, but the Bay Area seems set on cutting them down. We can easily see the results in every cut areas, where the highly flammable grasses and thistles and poison hemlock spread. (Those plants will not successfully grow in shade.) And once the targeted trees are killed or “thinned” or “limbed,” there is no returning them to a natural, healthy state. They also make an ugly sterile-looking unnatural “park.” It’s a terrible plan.
I vote for the option of “No Project.” That is the safest plan in preventing fire and protecting our parks and animals. Please, OVM, take the lead in being on the right side of history, inspiring other cities, and making Oakland safer and more beautiful, but not more vulnerable to fire.
Bev Von Dohre
Slakewings@aol.com
Chapter Nine
Hidden Disability
by Bev Jo and Linda Strega
Part 1
OPPRESSION IS SICKENING
Bev Jo
Some have wondered why this chapter is in our book about Radical Feminism. Since our book is about having as much equality among women as possible and recognizing what harms us and what divides us, this information is essential, and is even more timely after 25 years, seeing how patriarchy has harmed and continues to harm women physically, mentally, and emotionally. Understanding some of the causes can help protect us.
We’ve also tried to include information to protect and improve health, especially since we’ve seen too many friends die and be disabled from possibly preventable diseases and pharmaceuticals and unhealthy eating recommendations. I know so many women who have worked very hard to eat what they don’t like and give up what they love, based on popular and accepted misinformation, and end up seriously damaging their health.
Since we published our book in 1990, many more Lesbians and other women we know, of all ages, have some form of chronic illness, chronic symptoms, and/or chronic pain. Many who are under fifty also have hormonal disruption, probably from growing up exposed to xenoestrogens (the toxic chemicals that mimic true estrogens) – from food cooked and stored in plastic (including Teflon pans), pesticides, and soy (carcinogenic and toxic to the thyroid). Girls are increasing going into puberty at earlier ages. (When I was a girl, puberty started around twelve but more recently it’s been said to start around ten, but now some girls are beginning puberty at seven. This makes little girls vulnerable to getting pregnant from rape as well as affecting their health in other ways.) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/puberty-before-age-10-a-new-normal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Doctors’ and alternative healers’ advice to be vegan or vegetarian, to eat soy (which is now in almost all processed food), toxic trans fat/hydrogenated oil, and high carbs, and to eliminate healthy organic saturated fat and meat has been disastrous for health, including leading to increasing numbers of women having hysterectomies and/or oopherectomies (removal of ovaries). I’ve noticed that vegans seem to have the most health problems,1 but many women are damaged in ways that women were not in the past. The hormonal disruptions also have severe mental and emotional effects, which affects relationships, including in our online Radical Feminist community.
Do not believe the myth that people live longer now. Remove statistics for decreased infant mortality and women dying in childbirth, and it becomes clear that people do not live longer.2 Women also have far worse quality of health now. Tombstones from hundreds of years ago, as well as genealogical records, show extremely long-lived women in the past. Alice Walker wrote about her great, great, great, great grandmother living to 125. A number of other women who had been slaves also lived to well over a hundred,3 in spite of the extreme stress of their lives. http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2012/02/11/convention-of-former-slaves/
Many of the forms of hidden disability that I’m seeing among friends are increasing, and it’s like solving a mystery to find out what is really happening to us. I believe there are multiple causes: toxic chemical and radiation exposure (including medical X-rays), synthetic, poisoned, and GMO food; polluted water and air; and new or engineered pathogens. The toxic and radiation exposures alone also account for the epidemic proportions of cancer, which was extremely rare when I was a kid. It’s amazing that anyone is still alive, actually, or that all people don’t have cancer, like nuclear physicist, John Gofman,4 said about the levels of radiation that people are now exposed to. (If any doctor tells you than an “X-ray is only like one plane trip,” they are lying. Doctors know the truth. They also all know that any radiation causes heart damage.) http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html
I’ve been disabled with a mystery illness for more than half my life, since 1981. It has been called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Fibromyalgia,5 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, etc. Now I wonder about the cause being the bacteria spirochete, Borellia Burgdorferi/Lyme disease and/or the accompanying dozen co-infections also spread by Ixodes genera ticks.6
Then in the mid-Eighties, I also became increasingly reactive and sensitive to toxic stink that men and their corporations have spread throughout our environment as they continue inventing new “fragrance” poisons, which are completely unregulated and which never stop smelling horrible. It’s a clever way for men to mark territory while making money, from dirty perfumed laundry products to the countless and unnecessary “personal care” products mainly aimed at women consumers. My health was already damaged by growing up in Cincinnati with many factories spewing toxins, but now I still can’t escape Proctor and Gamble, thousands of miles away, because people are paying to pollute our neighborhoods through their drier vents with the disgusting stink of products like Tide and Downy, making our neighborhoods smell like factories. It’s a patriarchal/male nightmare affecting the health of all of us, against our will.7
The terms for people who react sooner to the toxins that are harming all of us is CI (Chemical Injury), MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) or EI (Environmental Illness, which implies the environment is making us sick). But most people just blame themselves and say they have “allergies,” which is like saying that lung cancer from cigarette smoke is an allergy, and personalizes what is actually a political issue that affects everyone’s health. Not to mention these toxic products are polluting the air, earth, and water where they are manufactured, used, and disposed of. It’s amazing how many people claim to care about the environment, but don’t consider refusing to support the companies producing such nasty filth. It’s one of the simplest, easiest ways to help the earth, save money, and protect your own health.
When I first became sick, my lover at the time also had the same symptoms that felt like a flu that wouldn’t go away: deep fatigue, low grade fever, swollen glands, pain, aching, and some friends also had similar symptoms, so I suspected a pathogen, with perhaps the addition of toxic exposure, to explain why some recovered and some didn’t. However, Lyme and the co-infections, transmitted through Ixodes genera tick bites could look like exposure to the same pathogen if we picked up ticks around the same time when hiking or working in the hills (which is exactly how Lyme was first discovered in the Seventies, by a cluster of kids with rare juvenile arthritis.) No one publicly seemed to know about Lyme in 1981. Or at least no doctor we saw mentioned it.
I’ve also since learned about the damaging effects of metabolic syndrome, which includes polycystic ovaries, pain, etc. from eating as the doctors demanded. One fat-phobic idiot Lesbian doctor I saw was horrified I ate avocados because of the healthy high fat content.) Mainstream doctors’ recommendations to eat low fat actually have increased heart disease, cancer, arthritis, dementia, etc.8 Stress, like oppression, also increases high blood sugar and insulin resistance. Many of us probably also have symptoms of metabolic syndrome, but that doesn’t account for other symptoms or for so many of the symptoms to match.
It took me a while to identify as disabled, because my chronic illness isn’t visible. Also, most able-bodied women seem to try very hard to believe that I’m no different from them. Sometimes it’s hard even for me to take my sickness seriously because I’m fairly mobile and, when under pressure, I’m can still function, although I feel much worse for a long time after. But I know the difference between how I am now and how I was previously, and I’m lucky to have friends who also know that difference. Most importantly, my closest friend, Linda, is similarly disabled. We give each other valuable support and recognize that each other’s illnesses are real.
When we first published our book in 1990, I’d already been to nine doctors, four acupuncturists, two naturopaths, and five homeopaths. I tested positive once for mononucleosis, but was told it couldn’t be chronic, so it was ignored. Most of the doctors told me I wasn’t sick since they couldn’t find anything wrong, which I later found is common with illnesses causing hidden disability, so it look me years to get a diagnosis. CFIDS used to be called “The Yuppie Disease” because statistics showed that a lot of middle-class people have it. The fact is that these are usually the only people who can afford to see the average of eight doctors that it takes to finally get some sort of diagnosis. Those who are too poor to afford doctors aren’t generally listed in the statistics.
Four of the doctors I saw were sympathetic, but the rest were offensive and incompetent. I was concerned that I might possibly have a contagious disease, but the infectious disease specialist I saw assured me that a person couldn’t remain contagious after a couple of months of being sick. In fact, there many long-term contagious diseases. Another Lesbian doctor told me that there was nothing wrong with me and that I should just lose weight. (I was about 140 pounds at the time.) She told my underweight lover with identical symptoms that she should just drink coffee. Years later, I discovered that many of our symptoms match those for the early stages of leukemia and some other kinds of cancer. Certainly, you don’t want to try to lose weight with cancer since it’s a wasting disease and those who weigh more have a better chance of surviving.
I’ve heard many ridiculous, contradictory doctors’ opinions. One het woman osteopath flipped out when I told her that not all women are heterosexual, in response to her bizarre ranting that I should use birth control, although I couldn’t be more obvious as a Dyke and was at the appointment with my lover. In her crazed state of Lesbian-hatred, she said I needed female hormones, for no explainable reason.
Eventually, though, enough people became sick with similar symptoms that names for our illnesses were invented which still don’t really describe the cause.
I’m not surprised by the treatment I’ve gotten from doctors. I’m more upset by how I’m treated by other women. Since my constant fevers cause my face to look red, I’m often told I look “healthy.” They say that life is hard for everyone, and I should just try harder. They are terrified of getting sick, so they want to pretend I’m not. It’s true that all women have difficulties, but we’re also all in different states of health. Some can push themselves to extremes and use stimulants to keep going, which only works for a while.
One of the most offensive but typical comments is “we cause ourselves to be sick, so if you wanted to get well, you would.” I can’t imagine a more male-minded idea. “You create your own reality” is a useful philosophy to manipulate the oppressed. Unfortunately, it not only benefits the patriarchy, it also helps oppressive people maintain their privilege and illusion of superiority over the rest of us. If positive thinking works so well, why don’t these people visualize themselves into being less oppressive? (It’s interesting to see what happens when they become chronically ill themselves.)
Oppression adds to the severity chronic illness since physical or emotional stress makes us sicker. I’m writing this partly because I want to help prevent other women from going through the same abuse from both the medical establishment and from our own kind. You body tells you when you’re sick. If you feel sick, you are – especially in our cultures where we are pressured to ignore pain and sickness. No one has the right to tell you you’re not sick, whether they’re a doctor or a friend.
Are These Man-made Illnesses?
Lyme disease didn’t used to exist. Many of us believe that the US government created Lyme disease/Borellia Burgdorferi when they injected Ixodes genera ticks with multiple pathogens in military biological warfare experiments at Lab 257 on Plum Island, New York (as described in the book Lab 257), near Old Lyme, Connecticut. (Therefore, it’s Lyme disease, not “Lyme’s disease,” since it’s named for the location and not a doctor.) The ticks were also injected with co-infections, such as Babesiosis, Erlichsiosis, Bartonella species, Yersinia enterocolitica, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, Chlamydia trachomatis, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, plus the newly diagnosed (in 2013) Borrelia Miyamotoi.
For those who are so mainstream or patriotic/nationalistic that they don’t believe that the US government, doctors, and scientists love to experiment on people, they should remember that the “land of the free” was built on genocide and slavery, and that giving American Indians blankets infested with smallpox virus was early biological warfare.
Patronizing people as “conspiracy theorists” does not change the facts about past, present, and future biological weapon use. Of course the medical history of scientists experimenting on people against their will, from Mengele to Tuskegee9 and Guatemala proves that they are not to be trusted or believed. The US government admitted to mutating viruses and bacteria, to “study their effects,” and then releasing them into urban areas such as the San Francisco Bay Area,10 which is why the theory of ticks injected with pathogens is not outrageous. Who knows what the long-term results of the known tests have been? The forgotten smallpox discovered in 2014 in a storage room in the US shows their level of criminal incompetency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment
The goal at Lab 257 was theoretically to develop pathogens to kill the domestic animals in the Soviet Union in order to destroy the economy and starve the people to death, but the scientists also experimented on ticks. (I believe every kind of experimentation like this is male marking of territory, from wreaking death and disease, to contaminating parts of the earth for millions of years with nuclear pollution. In the Nov., 2014 issue of Natural History magazine, under “Samplings,” a short article describe scientists injecting mice with human semen, for no apparent reason.)
Of course Nazi scientists had Russians and other Slavic people on their list for genocide, so being paid and praised by the US government to continue the Nazi war on the Soviets would have been even more appealing to Erich Traub, the Nazi in charge of bio-weapons on Plum Island.
“Carroll’s ‘Lab 257’ also documents a Nazi connection to the original establishment of a US laboratory on Plum Island. According to the book, Erich Traub, a scientist who worked for the Third Reich doing biological warfare, was the force behind its founding….”
“….With the end of the war, Traub came back to the United States under Project Paperclip, a US program under which Nazi scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, were brought to America….A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s,recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. ‘They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951 they were inoculating these ticks.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/25/the-deadly-secrets-of-plum-island/
Annual records of the first and subsequent cases of Lyme disease from the Seventies clearly show an increasing arc spreading westward from the part of the Northeast coast near Plum Island.11 Of course the medical propaganda now tells us that Lyme has always been here, but that’s another lie. Anyone old enough knows that we never saw or had to worry about ticks or Lyme disease when going into grasslands or woods. Many of us grew up playing in woods and only began to see ticks in the last few decades. Lyme disease simply did not exist anywhere in the US before the Seventies.
There are many myths about Lyme. A friend insists that Lyme always existed because it’s also in Europe, but it wasn’t there when I was living in England and Ireland in 1997 and 1998. It came to Europe later than the US, and my English lovers in the 1990’s had never heard of it and neither did anyone they know. The European vector is the same genera of Ixodes, and is named Ixodes Ricinus because the markings on the tick are reminiscent of the patterns on castor beans (Ricinus, same as the poison from castor beans). Borrelia Burgdoferi was probably brought to Europe by an infected person from the US who then was bitten by European Ixodes species Ixodes Ricinus. It’s now killing people there. (In the eastern US, the vector is Ixodes Scapularis, while in the west, it’s Ixodes Pacificus.) Lyme is now in Asia, South America, Australia, etc. When we are gone, it will be easier to spread the lie that it’s always been here, with theories that don’t make sense, like that it was found in a 5,000 year old corpse in the Alps. (In terms of trusting scientists’ competency in recognizing illness, they are still debating if syphilis came from Euro-Asia or the Americas.)
Lyme disease is most often spread by ticks, but can also be transmitted by fleas, mosquitoes, and mites. Evidence suggests that these small arachnids and insects don’t actually need to bite you for you to become infected. Lyme disease can also be spread in other ways, such as from mothers to fetuses. (At a Lyme lecture I went to, an alternative healer was positive she’d gotten it from her boyfriend.) The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) believe that Borrelia burgdorferi can even survive the blood purification processes that donated blood is subjected to, and therefore can be spread by transfusion. The related spirochete, Borrelia Miyamotoi, discovered in 2013, is not being tested for, which means the blood supply is even less safe.
Lyme is also very difficult to diagnose because the US government commission had a conflict of interest and eliminated half the main diagnostic markers, so most people who have Lyme show up negative on the tests. This saves insurance companies a lot of money. And of course if the government accepted responsibility for inventing this illness, there would be millions of lawsuits. Again, Borrelia Miyamotoi, is likely to cause similar symptoms but will also not show up on standard tests.
A great imitator, like its cousin syphilis, Lyme is found in the brains of many people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, MS, Fibromyalgia, arthritis, Lupus, etc.12
http://www.jneuroinflammation.com/content/8/1/90
From 36 known Borrelia species 12 cause Lyme disease or other borreliosis, which is transmitted by the bite of infected ticks….
When neutral techniques recognizing all types of spirochetes were used, or the highly prevalent periodontal pathogen Treponemas were analyzed, spirochetes were observed in the brain in more than 90% of AD cases. Borrelia burgdorferi was detected in the brain in 25.3% of AD cases analyzed and was 13 times more frequent in AD compared to controls.
http://bebrainfit.com/lifestyle/drains/lyme-disease-a-hidden-cause-of-mental-decline-and-alzheimers/
http://blog.lef.org/2013/12/is-alzheimers-caused-by-infection.html
They found spirochetes in about 90% of Alzheimer’s patients, while the bacteria were virtually absent in healthy age-matched controls.
The hopeful aspect to this is that Lyme can be more treatable and less of a death sentence than some of these illnesses. (Friends who have done the best have used specific herbs.)
My ex-lover got the classic expanding bull’s-eye rash which grew until it was enormous, with multiple circles of color, and then it disappeared in a few days. If it had been on her back, she would never have known it was there. Nothing else causes that rash, yet the doctor declared that she didn’t have Lyme because the test was negative – even though I’d told her that the medical literature says it doesn’t show up in tests for at least six weeks. This idiot doctor also told us that the Western Fence Lizard transmits the bacteria, when, in reality, the lizard has a mechanism in her blood that completely kills it, leaving ticks on her free of Lyme. (Don’t expect to get correct answers from doctors – most are arrogant and incompetent, which is a dangerous combination. They killed my mother. Most people I tell her story to have a similar one where doctors killed a loved one of theirs.)
When a friend got Lyme while camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains, she said she saw hundreds of tiny black bumps on her legs, which she’d never seen before during previous Sierra camping trips, and which turned out to be Lyme ticks. If the percentage of Ixodes Pacificus carrying Lyme was even 1%, then of course that’s where she got it. Every year, the numbers of ticks and infected ticks are increasing in California and elsewhere. The East Coast, where Lyme began, havs the highest percentage of infected ticks, recently listed as 35%.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/ticks-bay-area-021814.html
I suspect Lyme was the cause of some friends dying while diagnosed with other illnesses, such as MS. Leslie Feinberg blamed Lyme and the co-infections for her death on Nov.15, 2014. I suspect Lyme pain and depression is behind some suicides also.
Many of us believe that Lyme is incurable and is chronic.13 I know many women with Lyme, and none have fully recovered. A Rheumatoid Arthritis specialist I know says he believes it’s not chronic, but turns into Fibromyalgia — which is chronic illness. So if Borrelia encysts and hides as spirochetes do, going through stages with remissions, then who knows if it’s still there? I spoke with Lucia Hui, Senior Public Health Biologist at the California Department of Health around 2002, to talk with her about Lyme. That was before she went on an expedition to the Sierras to study Lyme and got the classic Erythema migrans rash. She knew the protocol and immediately began treatment, but years later, she was taking $1000 worth of antibiotics a month, and still sick. She’s now listed as leading Lyme support groups.
A new myth is that unscrupulous doctors and alternative healers are behind the theory of Lyme as a chronic illness for their own benefit. There are a few doctors and healers who are conning people for money, and that has always been true about chronic illness, but the majority of doctors are deliberately denying acute Lyme even when people have classic symptoms, as well as denying Lyme as chronic illness. Some doctors actually refuse to write a prescription for the more accurate test, even when the patient agrees to pay for it since insurance won’t. For those who doubt the reality of Lyme as chronic illness, I suggest going barefoot, in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, off trail in a wooded or grassy area where a lot of deer visit, and sit and lie on the ground until you are covered in ticks. Eventually, you’ll get Lyme and then can tell us how chronic it isn’t.
Some scientists believe that AIDS is a similar bio-weapons creation, although I believe the theory that HIV was inadvertently spread from chimpanzees to humans in Africa, in 1955, through an experimental polio vaccine given by greedy US doctors. There’s an excellent award-winning 2003 film now free online called The Origin of AIDS
(http://www.originofaids.com/,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWd4KblpDsc,and http://freedocumentaries.org/int.php?filmID=123), which explains how Dr. Hilary Koprowski and his research team, in a race to develop the first live polio vaccine, used chimpanzee kidney cells. (Albert Sabin beat him anyway.) One of the women doctors in their group told them that their vaccine was not safe because she could see other unknown viruses in it. They ignored her, of course, because status and money were more important than health. Although Koprowsky denied using chimpanzees since that was too dangerous because of the possibility of transmission of pathogens from humans’ closest relatives, the film proves that he did use 200 chimpanzees and interviews Africans who captured and cared for them.
It’s revealing also that they gave Africans their experimental vaccine rather than people in the US.
Considering that humans have been eating primates in Africa for millennia without developing AIDS, the polio vaccine explanation makes more sense that the “bushmeat” theory, which blames the introduction of HIV into humans through contact with killed primate blood and blames Africans. Edward Hooper writes about this in his book, The River and in his article at http://www.aidsorigins.com/more-supportive-opvaids-bushmeat-hypothesis-revised-response-recent-faria-paper-science.14
Unlike other viruses, HIV, as a retrovirus, was difficult to discover, but there was pressure to do it because of the many rich European-descent men being affected. Perhaps, also, men who wanted sexual access to as many women as possible, wanted to not have to worry about such a deadly STD. There is not similar urgency with finding out what is behind the many chronic illnesses that keep appearing, even though they are devastating people’s lives and can be fatal, and certainly not when the US government could be sued, as in the case of the invention of Lyme disease and the many co-infections.
A Clean Environment Doesn’t Stink
In the years since I first became sick, I’ve grown much more sensitive to the man-made chemicals which surround us daily. My original illness has another cause, but not being able to escape toxic chemicals definitely worsens my health. And these chemicals damage all women and make some severely ill.15
Below is my separate section about chosen pollution:
UNFORTUNATELY, WE NEED AIR TO BREATHE
Support Women’s Health, Not the Chemical Industry
I want an end to patriarchy and all oppression. But sometimes, more than anything, I just want to smell clean air. Well, not really clean air, which is impossible, but air that doesn’t stink. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it?
It’s not even that I live in a neighborhood with factories. I grew up in one, so I know them well – toxic fumes pouring out day and night, a half block from our house. Sometimes the paint was blistered off cars in our neighborhood when the acid rain came down. At school, there was always another factory stench. Where I live now, it could be relatively clean-smelling, even in this city. Sometimes I can smell beautiful clean air from the ocean miles away, with trees and flowers on the wind, but the next moment will be a lungful of nauseating stink.
And why? Simply because of the greed of industry and the stupidity of people agreeing to be conned into paying for poisonous, dirty laundry products to pollute our air.
If we smell the products’ stink, we’ve already absorbed their neuro-toxic molecules into our lungs. I think of my friend who has already had cancer twice. She and none of us should be forced to breathe this pollution against our will. It doesn’t help that the spewers of this filth are not unreachable unchangeable corporate industries. It might be easier to accept if it was. No, these are regular people in this and every neighborhood, who choose to buy and release this poison into the air we are forced to breathe. But, again, why?
The irony is that I grew up in Cincinnati, being exposed every day to factory stink from Proctor and Gamble, one of the US’s biggest polluters. (Don’t believe their “green” industry label.) It’s like nightmare science fiction that I am now thousands of miles away and still am forced to smell Proctor and Gamble’s toxic products in our neighborhood and in the nauseating fumes pouring off people’s clothes and bodies in every public place. Even walking alone in the woods, I can smell most people from 100 feet away, with Proctor and Gamble following me.
Whenever I think I’ve discovered all the monstrous ways that men have made this beautiful planet into a nightmare, I find another man-made illogical horror.
It wasn’t until I was sick for several years that I became chemically sensitive enough to identify as “chemically injured” or having Multiple Chemical Sensitivities. We’re all injured by exposure to toxic chemicals in patriarchy, but some of us have had more exposure to pesticides or other toxins and so react sooner. Many of us who are chemically injured are considered to have an unnaturally sensitive/strong sense of smell, but in reality, we’re more like people who live closer to nature. People who surround themselves with toxic scents have damaged, deficient senses of smell. (I’ve read that people in Viet Nam could smell US soldiers in the dark from a long distance because of their toothpaste and other scented products.)
Almost everyone trivializes themselves and others by considering this health issue merely their own or others’ “personal problem,” calling our reaction to toxins “allergies.” Allergies have nothing to do with it any more than people with lung cancer from cigarette smoke are “allergic.” It is simply poison. Ninety-five percent of the ingredients in scented products are synthesized from petrochemicals and many, like benzene and toluene, are considered hazardous waste.
Most women know that factory chemical fumes, gasoline, pesticides, herbicides, natural gas, carbon monoxide, and tobacco smoke (among others) are carcinogenic, and that some can kill you outright if you’re exposed to high enough concentrations. But they often don’t realize that the chemicals they choose to wear or use in their homes are toxic: perfumes, cosmetics, scented candles, scented soap, shampoo, hand lotion, toothpaste, “cleaning” products, “air fresheners,” hair spray, chemicals to curl or straighten hair, deodorants, detergents, fabric softeners, disinfectants, etc.
Most people seem shocked that the government allows scented chemicals to be sold without testing or regulation – yet they are usually aware that the government lies to us constantly, about invading other countries, the safety of our water and food, pesticides and herbicides, hormones and antibiotics in meat, GMO and irradiated food, nuclear reactors’ lack of safety, nuclear waste, and big pharmaceutical companies’ toxic drugs, etc. Toxic scented products are made by many of the same industries, just as chemotherapy drugs are made by the industries that cause cancer. People who would never buy other products from well-known polluters happily give these corporations money when it comes to personal care and household products.
These products aren’t needed by anyone. Plain unscented soap, baking soda, and white vinegar are as effective in cleaning our homes, and unscented body-care products are better for us than scented ones. But the chemical industry is big business. Through aggressive advertising, we’re taught that we, our clothes, and our homes aren’t really clean without a strong perfumed odor. Living in a polluted world has also meant that many people don’t have much sense of smell left, so the stronger a product smells, the more people are likely to buy it.
The mania for “cleanliness” and selling unnecessary products has meant that chemists continue to develop new chemicals that are much more persistent than before and which don’t wear off like previous products. Yet it’s not like any of these products smell good, no matter how many ads (mostly aimed at women) try to convince us. They’re disgusting, and their neurotoxins damage nerves and mucous membranes so that people lose their sense of smell and therefore use more and more of the poisons — ironically dirtying their homes and bodies while believing they are clean.
In the last several years, laundry products, especially fabric softeners and anti-static strips, have become so scented that people become sick from living near laundromats or even in neighborhoods where people use a lot of them. The perfumes in these products are so strong that they spread and cling much more than the milder scents used years ago. In the US, they’re added to printers’ ink, so we’re exposed to toxins in many magazines, newspapers, mailed advertisements, and even imprinted plastic grocery bags. No matter how the manufacturers advertise their products as having a “fresh,” “natural,” “flowery,” “herbal,” or even “unscented,” these are toxic chemicals and don’t smell natural at all. Many people find their odor nauseating. But these chemicals have become so popular that it’s almost impossible to go anywhere public without being surrounded by people wearing them.
Many ailments which are misdiagnosed as arthritis or migraine headaches are actually environmentally caused. Those who react first are like the canaries that miners took into the mines to find out if there was poison gas they couldn’t smell. We may be the first to suffer the effects of these toxins, but they’re poisonous to everyone — it’ll just take a while longer for some to use up their tolerance and become sick. So please take this seriously, for our health and yours. If we say something you’re using is sickening to us, please stop using it. (It can be hard to find unscented products, but the more consumers demand them, the more there’ll be.)
Chemical injury and exposure to toxic products can cause cancer, headaches, heart arrhythmia, nausea, migraines, joint pain, brain fog, asthma, depression, irritability, insomnia, exhaustion, dizziness, confusion, panic attacks, memory loss, rashes, liver and kidney damage, vomiting, seizures, hormone disruption, immune suppression, MS-like neurological reactions, pulse and blood pressure changes, impaired vision and concentration, aggression, loss of muscular coordination, convulsions, and coma.
There’s no escape, at home or outside. The laundry products’ fumes pour into our open windows and seep in even when the windows are closed. Going to a supermarket means being forced to breathe in nauseating stench from shelves of toxic air “fresheners,” laundry products, and pesticides. But most health food stores also reek of nasty-smelling scented products, and any open food you buy also smells and tastes nasty from perfumes and other toxins.
Almost every human stinks of “personal care” products and detergent and fabric softeners. Then the airborne stench sticks to us, so we bring it home, where it affects those we live with. (After being at any public event, I can’t even wash my clothes because the stink will remain unless I hang my clothes outside for days. I also always have to wash myself to get the stench off me.)
Why do women who otherwise are very savvy about other patriarchal cons participate in this? Unless someone has lung or heart problems or has been chemically injured, they usually choose to stink. Very few don’t. They willingly pay money to apply men’s scents to their bodies, marking themselves as men’s property because they believe it makes them smell “good.” It doesn’t matter how terrible they really smell – the marketing propaganda convinces them otherwise. In reality, perfume is as romantic as hazardous waste.
The use of toxic perfumes and cleaners is a female and feminist issue, because women are the most targeted by advertising, and women are the majority victims of Chemical Injury. Men also tell women we are dirty. Also, many women feel contaminated from growing up in patriarchy and from sexual assault, as well as from voluntary contact with men, so women are obsessed with trying to be clean. For some, that even means developing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Major corporations, like Proctor and Gamble, know this and direct their advertising accordingly, showing women looking crazed with ecstasy as their smell their nasty laundry products.
Peoples’ attachment to scented products shows in their trying to find “organic” scented products, but one study showed that every scented product, including those labeled organic, contained toxic ingredients. Also, be aware that many products that claim to be scent-free are not. Most stores smell so bad that you can’t even tell until you are home and your sense of smell clears that the product you just bought is scented.
Another increasing health problem is also caused by people’s choices: burning wood, garbage, etc. in their fireplaces.16 Burning is the cause of half the winter air pollution where we live. Most people in this area have adequate heat through gas or electricity, so they burn for pleasure, ignoring that people are literally dying. Having friends with asthma and congestive heart failure who are seriously affected is making me more aware of the damage from burning, but it’s also affecting the health of everyone, including animals, just as smoking does. When we can’t prevent most pollution, it’s upsetting that people selfishly choose to make the air absolutely filthy, against our will.
http://www.ehhi.org/woodsmoke/woodsmoke07.pdf:
Although wood smoke conjures up fond memories of sitting by a cozy fire, it is important to know that the components of wood smoke and cigarette smoke are quite similar, and that many components of both are carcinogenic. Wood smoke contains fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, sulfur dioxide and various irritant gases such as nitrogen oxides that can scar the lungs. Wood smoke also contains chemicals known or suspected to be carcinogens, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and dioxin.
Wood smoke interferes with normal lung development in infants and children. It also increases children’s risk of lower respiratory infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. Wood smoke exposure can depress the immune system and damage the layer of cells in the lungs that protect and cleanse the airways.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), toxic air pollutants are components of wood smoke. Wood smoke can cause coughs, headaches, eye, and throat irritation in otherwise healthy people.
For vulnerable populations, such as people with asthma, chronic respiratory disease and those with cardiovascular disease, wood smoke is particularly harmful — even short exposures can prove dangerous.
The particles of wood smoke are extremely small and therefore are not filtered out by the nose or the upper respiratory system. Instead, these small particles end up deep in the lungs where they remain for months, causing structural damage and chemical changes. Wood smoke’s carcinogenic chemicals adhere to these tiny particles, which enter deep into the lungs.
Recent studies show that fine particles that go deep into the lungs increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. EPA warns that for people with heart disease, short- term exposures have been linked to heart attacks and arrhythmias. If you have heart disease, these tiny particles may cause you to experience chest pain, palpitations, shortness of breath, and fatigue.
The particulate matter in wood smoke is so small that windows and doors cannot keep it out—even the newer energy-efficient weather-tight homes cannot keep out wood smoke.
The EPA estimates that a single fireplace operating for an hour and burning 10 pounds of wood will generate 4,300 times more PAHs than 30 cigarettes. PAHs are carcinogenic.
A study by the University of Washington in Seattle showed that 50 to 70 percent of the outdoor levels of wood smoke were entering homes that were not burning wood. EPA did a similar study in Boise, Idaho, with similar results.
Saying “No” to an Exclusionary Community
Lesbian are my people. I love Lesbians with all my heart. I want us to have the best Lesbian communities possible, which is why I’m focusing on Lesbians.
Some say that it can be difficult to make Lesbian communities completely accessible, but one thing that everyone easily can do is to stop buying and using toxic scented products. They would save money, help their own health, and stop smelling bad, but most won’t consider it – even when that means they’re making it impossible for many Lesbians to be part of our community
I used to hate the cigarette smoke that was everywhere, but understood it was an addiction. What I don’t understand is why women insist on using these horrible-smelling products. Even women who are conscientious about doing other things for the environment, and would never dream of not recycling, don’t consider that buying toxic products means supporting industries that pollute neighborhoods with factories, as well as their own air space. And when they use terrible-smelling detergents like Tide, Gain, etc. and fabric softeners like Downy, they are making neighborhoods everywhere smell like factories. Many women object to other ways men mark territory, so why accept this?
Then there are women who slather on the most foul-smelling perfumes and colognes even though they know it makes others sick. Some of these products are so full of petrochemicals that they smell like kerosene or disinfectant.
“But what about people’s right to choose? We shouldn’t control what people want to do, should we?” Well, that used to be the prevailing attitude until laws had to be made to prevent people filling up every public place with toxic cigarette smoke. Even most ex-smokers are glad about that control now. The insistence on “freedom”is also behind large industries’ fracking, pollution of lakes, rivers, and ocean, as well as their spewing of factory filth into the air. Without regulations and laws, the rich do what they want, and the poor suffer and die. This is far more than personal — it’s a political issue about accessibility and the right to unpolluted air.
With cancer rates increasing, we can’t afford to play games about filling our lives and homes with carcinogenic products. And for those who say they love animals, how can they justify subjecting animals who have such sensitive senses of smell to such foul poisons? I remember when dogs didn’t get cancer. I remember when cancer was so rare that only one member in my huge extended family, which included many old people, got cancer. There is so much that we can’t control about carcinogens in our environment, but this is one source of cancer we can control and save money at the same time.
This isn’t trivial. When people with asthma can’t breathe, they can die. Even if they “just” have trouble breathing and their lungs become more permanently damaged, and then they’re forced to use steroids and amphetamines in inhalants that damage their hearts, isn’t that bad enough? Why is this being ignored for vanity? One friend who already knew that perfume is toxic came to an event, proudly saying she was “only wearing a light scent.” (It was horrible, and a Lesbian with asthma reacted immediately.) It reminds me of the addictive quality of plastic surgery. The selfish narcissism of all this is astounding. It’s very much about obeying male rules of femininity.
Women don’t stop even when beloved women singers tell their audience that being exposed to perfumes and colognes hurts their voices. Too many women will coyly announce you shouldn’t hug them if their “fragrance” is a “problem” for you, but if you remind them their products are damaging the health of everyone in the room, they usually answer, “I know.” They understand that “no smoking” sections next to smokers are meaningless, so this shouldn’t be too difficult to grasp. (One woman who insisted on wearing perfume she knew hurt others, had actually asked for money for months for her ongoing health problems, never making the connection). No one should be cavalier about this issue. Several women I knew who adamantly refused to stop subjecting others to toxic products are now so chemically injured that they can’t leave their homes.
I know women who say they want to give up their car to help the environment, but they won’t give up Tide. What is going on here? (I do not advocate women restricting their lives by giving up their cars and making themselves vulnerable using public transportation.)
It’s actually not that hard to stop buying toxic products. Women affected by having asthma or CI or MCS, or who sincerely care for the environment (and animals they live with) , manage to have completely unscented homes. Do know, though, when trying to change to safe products, that mainstream detergents marked “unscented” usually reek horribly. It’s good to follow recommendations from some of the MCS lists.
We shouldn’t have to choose between being in our Lesbian communities and protecting our health. Women who react the most severely to scented toxins should not be forced to be homebound. It is the right of every living being to be able to smell clean air and be able to breathe.
Can you consider what it’s like for those who are homebound to know they can’t even have a friend bring them a library book because the books smell so bad from being in homes with scented toxins like “air fresheners,” scented candles, cleaning products, etc. If cigarette smoke bothers you, can you imagine never escaping it? Almost no homes are safe to visit. But you’re likely to get hostility if you explain to friends why visiting them is difficult. They do understand on some level, because they wouldn’t want to spend several hours closed up in a room with a chain smoker, but somehow they take offense if you say their candle scented with oily volatile toxic ingredients is unbearable, even when unlit.
Trying to have friends visit creates another problem. Ninety-nine percent of those who say they are unscented actually reek from various products. Some of these products, like Tide, never go away. (A generous friend gave me a shirt from a Woman conference that she had washed in Tide. We hung it outside in the sun and rain for a year, and it still stunk horribly.) The bad smell also transfers to other surfaces (which is why I now always sit on a thermarest pad in public – that I am regularly harassed about using — which I have to leave outside after I go home, since it then stinks for days from being on public chairs). Before my housemate and I stopped being too afraid to make our home safe, we let a visitor sit on our couch for 2 hours – and our couch stank of Tide for over 6 months. We’ve also put down a plastic tarp on a chair for a visitor who was scented only with Gain, but the smell soaked right through the tarp and the chair stank so much afterwards that we couldn’t keep it in the house. Being in the same room with someone scented also means that you, your hair, clothes, and every bit of fabric in the room absorb the stink. Some people seem surprised at this, yet they understand and object when cigarette smoke does the same thing.
No friends’ cars are safe to be in, so I always drive. But when I’ve given rides to friends who were previously unscented, they often are using a new scented product. This happens a lot, but the worst was when a friend arrived reeking, even though we’d arranged I would drive us several hours to a women’s music event. Being in a car accentuates any scent because of the closed space, but I could smell her as soon as she arrived. She’d used a new lotion and was only mildly apologetic, but it never occurred to her that I should have said no to being trapped in the car with her all those hours. I didn’t, and was nauseated the entire time. I also know that when something like this happens it’s likely to have a long-term affect on damaging my health, plus making me increasingly chemically sensitive. She’d understood the situation, so why was the new lotion so important? She wouldn’t have dreamt of lighting up a cigarette and saying she needed to smoke. I still don’t know how to deal with this kind of thing, so I drive alone, unless I’m with a trusted friend, and even then, there are often problems.
Everyone is affected by scented toxins that we’re forced to breathe, but most don’t know it, and they attribute their symptoms to other things. Some of us end up taking caffeine, pain-killers, or other drugs, which adds to our worsening health, to make it possible to go out, so we stay a part of the Lesbian community we helped create. We always have to weigh whether the risk and the effects are worth it.
Too many Lesbians prioritize men and other non-Lesbians when being activists, volunteering, or donating. Consider that ill and disabled Lesbians get much less support than our oppressors, yet have much less resources. No one else supports Lesbians so Lesbians need to.
Making our spaces scent- and poison-free is one of the few things that we can do to make our communities safe and welcoming. No man-made chemicals smell better than natural Lesbian scent!
Endnotes
1. The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith, has excellent health information, including explaining why being vegan for twenty years permanently damaged her health, and why being an ethical omnivore, who eats pastured, organic meat is better for animal species and the environment than supporting extensive agriculture. (Most soy is produced by Monsanto.) http://www.lierrekeith.com/book-ex_the-vegetarian-myth.php
2. http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-constant-2-000-years.html
…. The increase in life expectancy between 1907 and 2007 was largely due to a decreasing infant mortality rate, which was 9.99 percent in 1907; 2.63 percent in 1957; and 0.68 percent in 2007.
But the inclusion of infant mortality rates in calculating life expectancy creates the mistaken impression that earlier generations died at a young age; Americans were not dying en masse at the age of 46 in 1907. The fact is that the maximum human lifespan — a concept often confused with “life expectancy” — has remained more or less the same for thousands of years. The idea that our ancestors routinely died young (say, at age 40) has no basis in scientific fact….
Again, the high infant mortality rate skews the “life expectancy” dramatically downward. If a couple has two children and one of them dies in childbirth while the other lives to be 90, stating that on average the couple’s children lived to be 45 is statistically accurate but meaningless. Claiming a low average age of death due to high infant mortality is not the same as claiming that the average person in that population will die at that age….
When Socrates died at the age of 70 around 399 B.C., he did not die of old age but instead by execution. It is ironic that ancient Greeks lived into their 70s and older, while more than 2,000 years later modern Americans aren’t living much longer.
http://www.healthpromoting.com/learning-center/articles/life-expectancy
The popular media often imply that increases in life expectancy are due to the wonders of modern medicine. This is false. Increases in life expectancy are due almost entirely to a decrease in the infant mortality rate….
Infant mortality in the US has decreased from more than 100 per 1,000 in 1920 to 10.9 today. During this same time, life expectancy has been said to have increased from 54 to 74 years.
At first glance it looks like people are living 20 years longer now than in the past. But this figure is misleading because it is just an average. It could mistakenly lead you to think that in 1920 most people lived to approximately 54 years of age and that now they live to approximately 74. This is not the case.
Consider these facts. In 1920 an adult 60 years old could expect to live an average of 16 more years, to about 76. Today an adult 60 years old can expect to live 20 more years, to about 80. That is only a four-year difference that appears in the life expectancy figures.
Adults are not living 20 years longer now than they did in 1920. In fact, adults today live little longer than they did in 1920, which is before the development of the powerful modern medications that are often credited with life extension. What has dramatically improved is our chance of surviving to 60.
Lies and Statistics
Mark Twain proclaimed that, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Surely he is not alone in the conclusion that statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics. The statistics commonly used to describe “advances” in the area of life expectancy are misleading, at best.
3. Convention of Former Slaves
http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2012/02/11/convention-of-former-slaves/
February 11th, 2012 by Brendan Wolfe
IMAGE: Washington, D.C., 1916. “Convention of former slaves. Annie Parram, age 104; Anna Angales, age 105; Elizabeth Berkeley, 125; Sadie Thompson, 110.” National Photo Company Collection glass negative. (Shorpy)
4. http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html
Dr. Gofman was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. in nuclear-physical chemistry and an M.D.) who was the first Director of the Biomedical Research Division of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from 1963-65 and one of nine Associate Directors at the Lab from 1963-1969. He was involved in the Manhattan Project and is a co-discoverer of Uranium-232, Plutonium-232, Uranium-233, and Plutonium-233, and of slow and fast neutron fissionability of Uranium-233. He also was a co-inventor of the uranyl acetate and columbium oxide processes for plutonium separation. He has taught in the radioisotope and radiobiology fields from the 1950s at least up into the 1980s, and has done research in radiochemistry, macromolecules, lipoproteins, coronary heart disease, arteriosclerosis, trace element determination, x-ray spectroscopy, chromosomes and cancer and radiation hazards. Starting in 1969 he began to challenge the AEC claim that there was a “safe threshold” of radiation below which no adverse health effects could be detected.
Fibromyalgia is a term for what could be multiple illnesses. http://www.fmcpaware.org/symptoms
6. Lyme disease is an infectious disease caused by the spirochete (spiral shaped bacterium) known as Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb). Lyme disease is most often spread by ticks, but can also be transmitted by fleas, mosquitoes, and mites. Evidence has suggested that these small arachnids and insects don’t actually need to bite you for you to become infected. There is also evidence that Lyme disease can be spread by a number of other methods, including, like its spirochete cousin, syphilis, sexually, as well as from mothers to fetuses.
To complicate diagnosis, a second Borellia species was discovered in 2013. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/ticks-bay-area-021814.html
Under Our Skin: The Acclaimed Documentary about the Untold Story of Lyme Disease.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565243/
In Lyme disease concurrent infections frequently occur. The clinical and pathological impact of co-infections was first recognized in the 1990th, i.e. approximately ten years after the discovery of Lyme disease. Their pathological synergism can exacerbate Lyme disease or induce similar disease manifestations. Co-infecting agents can be transmitted together with Borrelia burgdorferi by tick bite resulting in multiple infections but a fraction of co-infections occur independently of tick bite. Clinically relevant co-infections are caused by Bartonella species, Yersinia enterocolitica, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, Chlamydia trachomatis, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae. In contrast to the USA, human granulocytic anaplasmosis (HGA) and babesiosis are not of major importance in Europe. Infections caused by these pathogens in patients not infected by Borrelia burgdorferi can result in clinical symptoms similar to those occurring in Lyme disease. This applies particularly to infections caused by Bartonella henselae, Yersinia enterocolitica, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae.
Chlamydia trachomatis primarily causes polyarthritis. Chlamydophila pneumoniae not only causes arthritis but also affects the nervous system and the heart, which renders the differential diagnosis difficult. The diagnosis is even more complex when co-infections occur in association with Lyme disease.
NonSpiral Borrelia — Part 1 — Explanation of Shape shifting and Form Metamorphosis of Spirochetes
Part II — Cystic Borrelia and Related Topics Including Round Body Infections of the Brain
Why the government won’t allow treatment for Chronic Lyme disease
Dr Horowitz Lyme Disease and Chronic Illness
http://www.philstar.com/health-and-family/2013/04/09/928381/wash-alert-beware-toxic-detergentshttp://www.smartklean.com/html/the_truth.htmlAn excellent leaflet (“Fragrance: A Growing Health and Environmental Hazard) with a lot more information and links can be ordered through: Redemske Design, 344 Gardiner Road, Jefferson, ME 04348. Their phone number is 207-549-3531 and 207-549-5358.8. The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. http://www.lierrekeith.com/book-ex_the-vegetarian-myth.php
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/11/04/saturated-fat-intake.aspx
9. http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/04/02/lab.257/ From CNN.com: The facility at Plum Island, now overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/25/the-deadly-secrets-of-plum-island/
Carroll’s “Lab 257” also documents a Nazi connection to the original establishment of a US laboratory on Plum Island. According to the book, Erich Traub, a scientist who worked for the Third Reich doing biological warfare, was the force behind its founding.
During World War II, “as lab chief of Insel Riemsa secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island in the Baltic Sea,Traub worked for Adolf Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials,” states “Lab 257.
The mission was to develop biological warfare to be directed against animals in the Soviet Union. This included infecting cattle and reindeer with foot-and-mouth disease.
“Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war,” says “Lab 257.” While in the US in the 1930s, too, relates the book, Traub was a member of the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund which was involved in pro-Nazi rallies held weekly in Yaphank on Long Island.
With the end of the war, Traub came back to the United States under Project Paperclip, a US program under which Nazi scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, were brought to America.
“Traub’s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems” given to officials at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters, and to the CIA, “laid the groundwater for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island,” says “Lab 257.” “Traub was a founding father….”
The Long Island daily newspaper Newsday earlier documented this biological warfare mission of Plum Island. In a lead story on November 21, 1993, Newsday investigative reporter John McDonald wrote: “A 1950s military plan to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine called for making biological warfare weapons out of exotic animal diseases at a Plum Island laboratory, now-declassified Army records reveal.” A facsimile of one of the records, dated 1951, covered the front page of that issue of Newsday.
The article went on: “Documents and interviews disclose for the first time what officials have denied for years: that the mysterious and closely guarded animal lab off the East End of Long Island was originally designed to conduct top-secret research into replicating dangerous viruses that could be used to destroy enemy livestock.”
“Lab 257” has many pages about this based on documents including many that Carroll found in the National Archives.
The book also tells of why suddenly the Army transferred Plum Island to the Department of Agriculture in 1954the US military became concerned about having to feed millions of people in the Soviet Union if it destroyed their food animals.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff “found that a war with the USS.R. would best be fought with conventional and nuclear means, and biological warfare against humans not against food animals,” says “Lab 257.” “Destroying the food supply meant having to feed millions of starving Russians after winning a war”
Still, “Lab 257” questions whether there ever was a clean break.
Officials at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center have, however, insisted over the years that the center’s function is to conduct research into foreign animal diseases not found in the USespecially foot-and-mouth diseaseand the only biological warfare research done is of a “defensive” kind.
“Lab 257” also maintains that there is a link between the Plum Island center and the emergence of Lyme disease. It “suddenly surfaced” 10 miles from Plum Island “in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1975.” Carroll cites years of experimentation with ticks on Plum Island and the possibility of an accidental or purposeful release.
“The tick is the perfect germ vector,” says “Lab 257,” “which is why it has long been fancied as a germ weapon by early biowarriors from Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan to the Soviet Union and the United States.”
“A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s,” the book states, “recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. ‘They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951 they were inoculating these ticks.”
“Lab 257” goes on: “Dr. Traub’s World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de riguer for Erich Traub.”
10. The Reactor, May-June 1988, p. 12. From an article by James Coates in the San Francisco Examiner, 10 April 1988. “Army officials admitted in 1977 that the entire populations of San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. were subjected to germ warfare tests in the 1950’s and 1960’s when aerosols of germs were released into the air.”
11. 
12. http://www.jneuroinflammation.com/content/8/1/90 http://www.spirochaetalalzheimersassociation.org/intro.html
http://lymedisease.org/news/hardscienceonlyme/802.html
The results of Dr. MiKlossy’s review found a statistically significant association between spirochetes and AD. Spirochetes were observed in the brain in more than 90% of AD cases. Bb was detected in the brain in 25.3% of AD cases analyzed and was 13 times more frequent in AD compared to controls. Importantly, coinfection with several spirochetes occurs in AD. – See more at: http://lymedisease.org/news/hardscienceonlyme/802.html#sthash.xbiY3fwh.dpuf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15665404
J Alzheimers Dis. 2004 Dec;6(6):639-49; discussion 673-81.
Borrelia burgdorferi persists in the brain in chronic lyme neuroborreliosis and may be associated with Alzheimer disease.
Miklossy J1, Khalili K, Gern L, Ericson RL, Darekar P, Bolle L, Hurlimann J, Paster BJ.
Author information
Abstract
The cause, or causes, of the vast majority of Alzheimer’s disease cases are unknown. A number of contributing factors have been postulated, including infection. It has long been known that the spirochete Treponema pallidum, which is the infective agent for syphilis, can in its late stages cause dementia, chronic inflammation, cortical atrophy and amyloid deposition. Spirochetes of unidentified types and strains have previously been observed in the blood, CSF and brain of 14 AD patients tested and absent in 13 controls. In three of these AD cases spirochetes were grown in a medium selective for Borrelia burgdorferi. In the present study, the phylogenetic analysis of these spirochetes was made. Positive identification of the agent as Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto was based on genetic and molecular analyses. Borrelia antigens and genes were co-localized with beta-amyloid deposits in these AD cases. The data indicate that Borrelia burgdorferi may persist in the brain and be associated with amyloid plaques in AD. They suggest that these spirochetes, perhaps in an analogous fashion to Treponema pallidum, may contribute to dementia, cortical atrophy and amyloid deposition. Further in vitro and in vivo studies may bring more insight into the potential role of spirochetes in AD.
http://blog.lef.org/2013/12/is-alzheimers-caused-by-infection.html
Amyloid-beta Protein has Antibacterial Properties
Scientists have discovered that amyloid-beta protein has anti-bacterial properties, indicating that its production may be an adaptive response to infectious organisms, like invading spirochetes.3,4
The whole process may work something like this:
1. Damaged brain cells produce amyloid-beta protein as an adaptive response to the infection.
2. Amyloid-beta deposits grow and begin to affect brain cell connections and communication highways.
3. With damaged connections and communication highways, dementia symptoms begin and gradually worsen.
4. Spirochetes invade and infect the brain.
5. The brain’s normal defenses become dysfunctional as the macrophages (microglia) become trapped and then attacked within the core of the spirochete plaque.
6. With immune dysfunction setting in, the spirochete infection intensifies involving more and more brain cells.
http://www.spirochaetalalzheimersassociation.org/viduos.html
13. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8067017_Borrelia_burgdorferi_persists_in_thbrain_in_chronic_lyme_neuroborreliosis_and_may_be_associated_with_Alzheimer_disease
14. http://www.aidsorigins.com/origins-aids-pandemic
Ed Hooper: Since the publication of the revised paperback version of The River in 2000, I have continued my research and, as I have long been intimating on this web-site, I can now demonstrate (a) that the experimental OPV made in Stanleyville, Belgian Congo in the late 1950s was indeed prepared in the cells of common chimpanzees of the Pan troglodytes species, and (b) that the chimps involved in these experimental procedures included many chimpanzees from the Pan troglodytes troglodytes subspecies, including those that come from the very area of west central Africa which members of the bushmeat group insist is the source of pandemic AIDS. – See more at: http://www.aidsorigins.com/more-supportive-opvaids-bushmeat-hypothesis-revised-response-recent-faria-paper-science#sthash.GvBYMycx.dpuf
The former finding is hugely important, proving that the central tenet of the hypothesis proposed in The River was correct. The vaccine-makers continue to insist that they never used chimpanzee cells for the vaccine, but I and others have proved otherwise. (Some of the evidence for this was broadcast in the prize-winning 2003 documentary, “The Origins of AIDS”, but there is considerably more evidence that has not been published to date.) This confirms that the word of the vaccine-makers cannot be relied upon for any of the history relating to these trials. – See more at: http://www.aidsorigins.com/more-supportive-opvaids-bushmeat-hypothesis-revised-response-recent-faria-paper-science#sthash.GvBYMycx.dpuf
By contrast, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory proposes that an experimental OPV that had been locally prepared in chimpanzee cells and administered by mouth, or “fed”, to nearly one million Africans in vaccine trials staged in the then Belgian-ruled territories of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi between 1957 and 1960, represents the origin of the AIDS pandemic. It provides a historically-supported background: that between 1956 and 1959 over 500 common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii and Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were housed together at Lindi Camp (near Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo, now Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC). It proposes that in the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville (LMS) the kidney cells and sera of these different chimpanzee species and subspecies were used to prepare batches of CHAT vaccine, but that the fact that the vaccine was locally prepared was concealed by the scientists involved, and has been covered up ever since. (In the 1950s, in most countries around the world the kidney cells of Asian macaques were used for polio vaccine preparation. The use of chimpanzee cells and sera for vaccine preparation was a unique development, but it did not conflict with the 1950s recommendations of the WHO, which were that any suitable primate species could be used to produce polio vaccines.) Of particular importance is the fact that the different species and subspecies of chimpanzee were placed two to a cage at Lindi Camp, to encourage the more nervous pygmy chimps to learn to eat like the common chimps, and that there was a play-cage where up to 10 chimps at a time were placed. Thus there was every opportunity for the onward transmission of viruses like SIVs, through fighting, scratching, the licking of wounds, or coprophagia, the eating of faeces. One of the major vaccination campaigns with the experimental OPV (a version of CHAT vaccine, developed by Hilary Koprowski), was staged in the Belgian Congo capital of Leopoldville in 1958-60, and involved all the city’s children aged up to five years.
However, there is evidence that at least some African adults were also vaccinated in the capital, just as some 170,000 African adults were vaccinated elsewhere in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. Nearly forty years passed before it was confirmed by genetic sequencing that the first two cases of HIV-1 infection found in the world had occurred in the Belgian Congo – in fact both isolates came from Leopoldville, in 1959 and 1960. [To give some perspective, these two isolates are sixteen and seventeen years earlier than the next earliest isolate of HIV-1(M), which also came from the DRC, and roughly two decades earlier than any HIV-1 isolate from outside the DRC.] The correlation between the feedings of experimental CHAT vaccine in Africa and the first outbreaks of HIV infection and AIDS in the world (which occurred in the same towns and villages a few years later) is “highly significant” in statistical terms. The OPV theory ascribes the minor outbreaks of AIDS caused by other variants of HIV-1 (Group O, Group N and the more controversial “Group P”) to other polio vaccines (both oral and injected) that were prepared in the cells of chimpanzees and administered in French Equatorial Africa (including Congo Brazzaville and Gabon) in the same late fifties period. It ascribes the outbreaks of AIDS from HIV-2 (of which it maintains that only two were epidemic outbreaks) to other polio vaccines (both oral and injected) that were prepared in the cells of sooty mangabeys (or other monkeys that had been caged with sooty mangabeys) and administered in French West Africa in 1956-60. All the other HIV-2 groups that are claimed by the bushmeat theorists have infected just a single person, and some OPV theory supporters argue that dead-end, non-transmissible infections such as these are the natural fate of SIVs that infect human beings via the bushmeat route: that unless they are introduced in an artificial manner (as via a vaccine), they simply die out.
The above synopsis includes the detail that the use of chimpanzees to make these experimental polio vaccines was kept secret. The OPV theory proposes that the main reason for such secrecy back in the 1950s was that the killing of hundreds of the closest relatives to man (chimpanzees) to produce human vaccines was even then highly controversial, especially when it was being done in a country (the Belgian Congo) where the Belgian royal family had pioneered the conservation and protection of wild animals. Clearly the use of chimpanzee cells involved great potential risks (that humans might acquire a latent virus from their closest primate cousins) and great potential benefits (if the method produced an effective vaccine, then this technique might end up making the vaccine developers a great deal of money). The reason for the ongoing secrecy today is almost certainly the concern in “high places” that if the OPV theory should ever come to be proved, it would fundamentally shake public confidence in the integrity and reliability of the medical establishment, possibly leading to class action law-suits involving billions of dollars. It would also very likely undermine the future use of developing countries as a testing site for experimental vaccines.
There are two subsidiary theories that seek to explain the p
– See more at: http://www.aidsorigins.com/origins-aids-pandemic#sthash.5DiB5eQs.dpu
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity – MCS
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/queen-of-green/2011/05/be-sensitive-to-those-with-environmental-sensitivities/
http://www.eastbaymeditation.org/accessibility/fragrancefree.html
The Wall of Personal Testimony
Personal stories about life with chemical illness.
http://www.herc.org/wall/
http://www.getipm.com/personal/mcs-campbell.htm
Click to access fragrancefacts.pdf
http://www.getawhiffofthis.com/
MCS: The New Homeless « THE CHEMICAL EDGE
Toxins in woodsmoke:www.takebacktheair.com
Part Two
WORKER, HEAL YOURSELF
Linda Strega
The privileged classes have flooded the media for decades with advice on how to be healthy and how to get well if you’re sick. A common message is “You create your own reality” and so your illness is your own fault. Or maybe you’re not sick at all — you only think you are, or you’re faking — especially if you have an illness that no one is able to diagnose or cure. These messages permeate US culture and health care, and they are deadly to oppressed people.
When we’re sick, especially if we have an undiagnosed illness, we go to doctors and “alternative healers” who take our money to tell us that we aren’t really sick, or that we’re making ourselves sick by wrong thinking, or that we just aren’t trying hard enough. (That is, if we even have any money to see them with.) Our money goes to pay for their new cars, houses, health club dues, gourmet food, and world travel, while we go home on the bus or in our old broken down cars to figure out how to make do with $200 or $300 less that month because we had to pay the “healer.” Wait! Who did they say was creating this reality?
We still have the old problems of doctors who prescribe harmful drugs and do unnecessary or botched surgery, but those of us who know to be very careful about choosing and trusting medical doctors sometimes, in desperation, place hope in alternative health care providers who harm us in other ways. Some are excellent healers, competent and caring. But many alternative healers have their own ways of avoiding difficult diagnoses or illnesses which don’t respond to their treatments — they blame the sick person for negative thinking or not trying hard enough, or they recommend psychotherapy.
Instead of openly calling their patient a hypochondriac, neurotic, or hysterical, as doctors often do, they dress up their accusations in pseudo-psychological “psychic” terms. “You need to examine what benefits you’re getting from this illness, and why you don’t want to heal,” “The words you use are making you sick,” “You must have a spiritual problem,” or “You’re sick because you’re angry.” Many alternative healers, including Lesbian ones, subject their clients to Lesbian-hating, fat oppression, racism, and ageism as well as this routine classism and ableism, just as many M.D.’s do.
What the media and medics say wouldn’t damage us nearly as much if other Lesbians weren’t believing them and telling us the same mind-fucks. I hope this article will be useful to Lesbians and other women who, like me, are chronically ill and unable to work steadily at full-time jobs, or unable to work at all. It’s about struggling with the combined effects of illness and low income, plus ableism and work ethic guilt coming at us from able-bodied people, including other Lesbians. I’m writing to share support with others in my situation, not to convince skeptical readers. I’m not writing for anyone who believes that “we create our own reality,” or who believes that not being in the het work world or not being a professional (lawyer, doctor, professor, corporate manager, etc.) is a sign of personal failure. Anything read through the filter of those ideas will be distorted and used against us low-income, non-professional Lesbians with chronic illness.
I have what has been called Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction (CFIDS), also called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) outside the U.S. It is one of the mystery illnesses which affect millions of people, most of them female. The causes are said to be unknown and the illness has been debated among medical scientists, denied by many doctors, and ridiculed in the media. Some people’s symptoms have improved, but so far no one has reported complete recovery. Symptoms resemble those of mild to severe flu: chronic intermittent fever, aching body, constant debilitating fatigue, difficulty concentrating, joint pains, headaches, sore throat, and swollen glands. Some people have only some of these symptoms, while others have these and more. People with other chronic illnesses and with both visible and invisible disabilities also face denial and blaming.
The Rich Visualize — We Do the Work
Healthy Lesbians, like other people, are so scared of illness and the isolation, suffering, stigma, and poverty that usually go with it, that most would rather believe we aren’t really sick, or that we make ourselves sick, or allow ourselves to stay sick, or just aren’t doing the right things to make ourselves well—anything to convince themselves that it couldn’t happen to them. They don’t care about the harm their attitude does to us, or that they are adding to the very stigma and isolation they fear for themselves.
People who believe that we create our own reality believe this not only about health, but about every other aspect of life. To put this madness into some perspective, consider the following: A downwardly mobile daughter of rich parents told me that visualizing what you want works, really works. She knew, because after visualizing a trip to China for several weeks, she got a phone call from her extremely rich grandmother, inviting her to go to China with her. Amazing, isn’t it? These are indeed useful techniques for the privileged. If you’re the beloved daughter of a rich family and you want something expensive, by all means visualize, let them know what you want, and get ready for a good time. But for the rest of us, face it, this is not the path to fulfillment.
Affirmations and visualizations do work, as a way of focusing energy, making plans, and building confidence. They have to be acted on, supported with material means, and done in a social context. Oppressed people have been using them for centuries, which is why revolutionary activity continues everywhere. Affirmations and visualizations were the first steps in creating labor unions, and all liberation movements, including radical Lesbian movements and Dyke Separatism. We just don’t go around blathering about it in trendy jargon.
Individual solutions only work for those with privilege, because privilege buys them protection, comfort, and pleasure (at least temporarily). It also buys them the illusion that, “We create the world with our beliefs.” That’s precisely what ruling class patriarchy would like us to believe: that poor people create poverty and illness, racially oppressed people create racism and their own genocide, females of all ages invite rape, little girls cause their male relatives to assault them, Lesbians create Lesbian-hating. It follows then that oppressed people deserve no better than what we get. As long as the victim is blamed, the perpetrators of violence and injustice are safe to continue their destruction. And those with the unearned comforts of privilege get to feel superior, believing that their well-being is a sign of their virtue or supposed “hard work,” thanks to the propaganda of dominant US culture. Even less privileged people who happen to be healthy at present can feel superior to sick people who can’t work at all, because of the merciless US work ethic.
Unless they are unusually aware and conscientious, the heirs of privilege lull themselves with affirmations. They imagine that the universe needs only to be furnished with a mental pattern of their desires and, out of thin air, all goodies will shower down upon them. They don’t want to notice that as they dream, millions of working people all over the world are wearing out their lives manufacturing the goodies, providing the services, cleaning up after, and often doing without basic necessities of life. Millions of people are just scraping by with or without jobs, millions are dying of hunger and illness, not because of natural disasters, not because they think negative thoughts, but because of male capitalist rule.
What do we visualize for ourselves? Freedom from oppression, and we already know that won’t come out of thin air, any more than anything else in our lives does.
Sometimes oppressed people believe the propaganda of the rich and powerful, because we’ve internalized shame and self-hatred, or because it’s so painful to face the enormity of the injustice that’s done to us, or because it gives us illusory hope. Sometimes it seems easier to blame ourselves than to put the blame where it belongs and fight back. It’s also very difficult to accept that there are some things we don’t have total control over.
You Must Be Doing Something Wrong
When people believe that we create our own reality, they say many cruel things. One Lesbian told me, “Some people get addicted to their illness.” When you’ve been sick for a long time and have had to reshape your life because of illness, a statement like that really hurts. Being sick when you’re poor or working class doesn’t relieve you of work, responsibilities, or anxieties. It adds to them. What’s the reward she imagined we get? I have no doubt whatsoever that I’d rather be well, and in fact I follow disciplined health practices that would overwhelm most healthy people, to stay functioning and to try to regain my health.
Most healthy Lesbians overlook the enormous efforts I make to improve my health and to simply function at all. Through the years, I’ve seen more than enough doctors, acupuncturists, homeopaths, and other “natural healers.” I’ve read countless books about nutrition, herbs, and homeopathy, all of which I use regularly. I do Yoga or Qi Gong every day and take walks when I’m able, and I’m more careful than I ever dreamed possible about eating the most nutritious foods. I use herbs and supplements. I try to get adequate rest and sleep while dealing with chronic insomnia. I meditate and, yes, I visualize. I stay in touch with my feelings and find positive ways to express them; I pay attention to messages from my body; I’ve never smoked, and don’t use addictive substances, not even coffee, tea or sugar. I guard against exposure to toxic chemicals the best I can.
All these efforts keep me functioning. But I’m still sick. Sometimes I get sicker because of toxic exposure or other stresses that are beyond my control. Because I haven’t recovered, some Lesbians assume I’m not doing much to help myself. At this point, I’ve taken so much responsibility for my own health that it’s too easy to blame myself for “failing.” I don’t need other people pushing me to blame myself. Even if I wasn’t doing so much to heal myself, no one should blame anyone for being sick or for not getting well. That adds to our stress, and stress makes any illness worse.
“You Don’t Look Sick”
Other Lesbians’ not believing that I’m really ill has been a major problem. Friends and other ill Lesbians recognize the ups and downs of my physical condition even when I don’t say anything about it. But there are certain Lesbians who insist that I don’t look sick, that I must just be depressed, that I’d feel fine if I went out more. Logic doesn’t work with those who are determined to disbelieve. I’ve been told, “I’d be sick too if I sat home all day.” I don’t “sit home all day,” although illness prevents me from being as active as I’d like. But when I am seen at an event, that is used as “proof” that I’m not really sick.
It’s a relief when Lesbians take my word for it that I’m sick, as my closest friends have. I know someone cares when she doesn’t expect me to push myself to the point of collapse to keep up with her. I understand being confused at first, when a healthy Lesbian sees me socializing, or at a meeting, or grocery shopping, and thinks I can’t really be very sick. I don’t mind explaining about how seldom I can do those things, or about the hours of rest and sleep that precede and follow those activities, how I still always feel sick even when I’m apparently functioning for a short while as a healthy person, and how I pay with increased illness for exertions she can take for granted. But I don’t want to explain it to the same person over and over, and still have her doubt my honesty or sanity.
Some Lesbians tell me, “I don’t feel good either, but I just ignore it,” or, “Well, nobody really feels good, you know. Maybe you’re just hypersensitive about it.” Each of their days is filled with more activities than I could manage in a week, so I know that even if their health isn’t ideal, they’re not sick in the way I am. In fact, when these same Lesbians get temporarily sick with similar symptoms as mine (like when they have the flu), they’re completely incapacitated. I get sicker very fast when I have to push my activity level beyond a certain point, and I know of Lesbians with CFIDS/ME who have ended up in the hospital because they were forced to continue working beyond their capacity. We shouldn’t have to be that severely ill before we’re believed. Even then, a lot of people seem to think the illness is psychologically caused. It’s cruel.
Some Lesbians believe the propaganda that we’re just depressed. Depression is indeed listed as one of the symptoms of CFIDS/ME. It’s a challenge to avoid depression when we’re treated the way we are and suffer so many losses—jobs, a livable income, homes, friends, social life, social acceptability, independence, energy, favorite activities–but the illness and its symptoms are not caused by depression. I don’t even think that having CFIDS/ME in itself necessarily leads to depression. I know healthy Lesbians who are far more often depressed or otherwise unhappy than I am.
The fact that a number of people with this illness have killed themselves does not mean CFIDS/ME is actually just depression. Everyone with CFIDS/ME who’s told me she considered suicide said she felt despair because of the way she was disbelieved, scorned, and denied physical and financial support.
“You don’t look sick.” I’ve sensed different motives for people saying that. I think some Lesbians are trying to reassure us, hoping we’re not as sick as we feel. More often it means they don’t believe us. It’s not helpful, because facing the realities of being sick is frightening, and we often have to struggle against our own tendencies to deny that we’re sick. We don’t need other Lesbians to push us to deny being sick, because when we do, we end up trying to be as active as a healthy person and neglecting our healing practices, and that makes us dangerously sicker. It probably is confusing for healthy Lesbians who haven’t been around someone who’s chronically ill. Illness doesn’t always show. For instance, many people with cancer don’t “look sick.” Should we shut up until we collapse?
When you’re chronically ill, you learn to hide it as best you can. It’s a way of trying to be more acceptable and also a way to try and forget for a little while. (Most of us get a lot of practice trying to pass as healthy when we have to continue working for years while seriously ill.) Lesbians should also be aware that some other disabilities don’t show either, and that denial and passing as able bodied can also be difficult issues for some disabled Lesbians who aren’t ill. And, of course, it’s possible to have both visible and invisible disabilities; for instance, a Lesbian with limited mobility might also have CFIDS/ME and Chemical Injury.
The Boss Says “Get Back To Work!”
Then there are the Lesbians who ask, “Have you tried working it off?” That’s the kind of question that leaves me temporarily speechless. What choice do we have but to keep on working until we absolutely can’t, and then just keeping our lives together becomes a full-time job. The “working it off” question came up so often, and being unable to work is such a painful issue for me, it forced me to think about it more deeply.
I am haunted by the image of the malingerer, the person who’s sick or pretends to be sick or just won’t get well simply because they’re “lazy” and don’t want to work. Or rather, other people haunt me with that image which they project onto me. Where does it come from, I’ve wondered? Can’t they see how hard I’ve always pushed myself, how much I do in spite of being sick? But the malingerer is an imperialist capitalist lie made up by bosses and rulers and drummed into us from nursery school. The “malingerer” is the worker who won’t work, the soldier who won’t fight, because they’re supposedly pretending to be sick.
The indoctrination starts when the school child doesn’t want to go to school, because she’s sick. Ah, but “Is she really sick?” they ask. She must be taught that unless she’s at death’s door, and possibly even then, she must go to school, just as later in life she must go to work. I grew up in a factory town, and these teachings weren’t even disguised. “You’ll never hold down a job if you stay home every time you feel sick,” is what we were told. Schools are the places to train future workers, soldiers, and bosses, and all learn about the evil “malingerer”. We don’t learn that school, jobs, and being in the military can in themselves make us sick. In fact, we’re taught that they are good for us, and that only a bad, lazy person would try to avoid them. (Obviously, being in the military can also make you dead, or disabled from physical injury. But lifelong illness, such as Gulf War Syndrome, is a common result and seldom acknowledged as legitimate by authorities.) Yes, it’s sometimes important to be able to keep going no matter what, but no one should be forced to live that way all the time for someone else’s profit and power. And if the ruling class thinks these are such fine values, why don’t they live by them?
Nowadays I give myself advice that only another poor or working-class renegade could give me. A major breakthrough for me was realizing that my training and identity as “worker” was mostly an identity as “worker for somebody else.” I developed many strengths to cope with the demands and stresses of being a worker for others, but I also acquired deep-seated habits that drained my energy and self-esteem. Those habits are constantly reinforced and encouraged by the het world and also by many Lesbians, especially class-privileged and upwardly-mobile Lesbians. It has taken me a long time to realize that many middle-class and upper-class Lesbians have internalized the identity of “boss,” because I didn’t want to believe it. Now I know I have to believe it, for my own protection.
I was such a good, well-trained worker that even when I was alone, doing my own work, I felt compelled to do everything quickly and efficiently, ignoring my body’s pleas to stop for rest, food, and water — just like at a job. It wasn’t my natural pace at all. I now try to slow myself down and care for my body, so that when I have a “good” day I don’t drive myself non-stop and then drop into bed sicker than ever.
I was raised to believe that everyone else’s time was more valuable than mine. Being sick reinforced this belief, which was unconscious by then. Even now that I know better, it’s hard not to defer to Lesbians who have full-time jobs. My impulse is to consider their schedules, needs, and desires more important than mine. As a friend, I gladly make allowances for their limited amount of free time, and I’m genuinely sympathetic about the stresses and fatigue caused by their jobs. What’s been painful to recognize is that some well Lesbians don’t reciprocate by making allowances for my limited stamina and for the stresses and fatigue caused by illness.
Some act as if I’m on a long vacation, resent my ability to sleep late when I need to, and expect me to do as much as healthy Lesbians at social and political events. They don’t think about what it’s like to always feel as if you have the flu, to have an illness that forces you to sleep 10 to 12 hours a night or keeps you awake with insomnia night after night. They don’t think about what it’s like not having the money, acceptability, and (for some) health insurance benefits of a regular job, or how it feels to work organizing an event and then have to skip the after-meeting party because you’re too sick. I don’t want to be scapegoated for other Lesbians’ anger at having to work for others. I don’t think they should have to work at jobs either. Patriarchy and capitalism — namely, powerful and unscrupulous men — are responsible for workers’ oppression, not sick Lesbians who are unable to work.
The most cruel things have been said to me by class-privileged or upwardly mobile Lesbians with professional or semi-professional jobs. One, who was proud of her job and liked it, told me she had “a hard time with Lesbians who don’t work.” She felt resentful of Lesbians who lived on Social Security disability benefits, unless they were visibly disabled. She thought of them when she saw how high her Social Security taxes were, and it made her angry. She didn’t say a word about how much of her income taxes go to the enormous US military budget. Why does she choose to think of Lesbians with hidden disabilities or illness as thieves of her money? And why does she not acknowledge that her income after taxes is enough to live luxuriously, unlike anyone on disability income?
Being face-to-face with thrift store clothed, ill Lesbians who still have revolutionary ideals apparently triggers deep reactionary reflexes. Something odd is going on when, during one conversation, you feel yourself shrinking, your clothes suddenly feel old and shabby instead of just broken in and comfortable, and your ignorance about expensive electronic gadgets makes you feel inferior. Most likely the person you’re talking with is feeling and acting smug and superior. For those who invest their self-image and the major energies of their lives in the security and status of acceptable, good-paying jobs or professions, we embody some of their worst fears — being poor and unable to work, and having no job identity to prove our worth. They seem to be thinking, “I’m not like her. I’m not like her, I’m not like her.” Meaning, “That can never happen to me.” In fact, the same Lesbian who resented sick Lesbians on disability income used to say, “That’s not going to happen to me — I have health insurance.”
Actually, given the same circumstances of class oppression and/or other oppressions, and illness, it would happen to her too. It could still happen to her. Anyone can get chronically ill, and in the US, if you’re not rich, poverty soon follows. It doesn’t feel good being less important to someone than their fears, their need to feel superior and safe. But the real struggle is to avoid internalizing their destructive attitudes.
As for jobs, I think Lesbians should have as much money, status, and power as conscience and circumstances allow. Professions and certain jobs buy Lesbians some of those things and give them the opportunity to help other Lesbians with less privileges. But we’re not failures in life, nor burdens on society, for not having a job or profession –nor is any Lesbian, able-bodied or not, who gives up the security of steady jobs for the risky but relatively independent life of part time low-paid self employment. That takes courage and shows sound values. Like many of us knew decades ago, working at jobs and professions that keep the capitalist het world prosperous and functioning is a necessary evil at best. Lesbians without jobs don’t get the money or acceptability of being an employed worker; however, we can rejoice in the fact that we’re not contributing our labor, attention, and good ideas to any patriarchal institutions.
As a Lesbian Separatist who’s worked at jobs while relatively healthy and also while increasingly sick, and who at present cannot work, my experiences have given me insights I would otherwise have missed. I value the insights of Lesbians who experience life from outside acceptable boundaries. We’re all outsiders to the degree that we identify openly as Lesbians. In addition, those of us who cannot or will not buy pieces of acceptability from the het world have a chance to sharpen our perceptions. It’s either sharpen them or be overwhelmed by negative propaganda. That gives us a lot to share with each other and with any other Lesbians who want to know what we have learned.
Working For Ourselves
I have dear Separatist friends of every class who have acceptable jobs yet still value my life and work and don’t retreat into acting superior. So I know it’s possible. My friends have the courage to face their own vulnerability, they love and empathize with other Lesbians, and are committed to bridging differences among Lesbians. Lesbians I meet who don’t have those qualities tend to drift, or hurry, into more privileged lives, a sad and unnecessary loss all around. Ableist attitudes serve patriarchy and capitalism, not us. We didn’t invent them. We learned them, and we can unlearn them.
In the early years of my illness, I still hoped to get well. At the same time, I had to be prepared for the possibility that this could be a lifelong illness and that it had caused permanent damage to my nervous system and/or internal organs. This isn’t negative thinking or “making it happen.” The material world is real. If a truck runs over us, we get broken bones. When toxic chemicals and radioactive pollutants assault our bodies our bodies are injured. And if we’re under stress because of oppression, and experiencing environmental racism and classism, unsafe homes and neighborhoods, lack of transportation, lack of jobs or low paid and unsafe jobs, overwork, homelessness (even while working), lack of access to nutritious food or decent health care, we’re more likely to get sick and stay sick from toxins and harmful microbes.
It’s especially cruel to blame an oppressed person for being sick. That’s blaming her for her own oppression instead of fighting to end it, and adds another load of stress onto an already overburdened body and mind. All the Lesbians I’ve known of who died young because of illness were oppressed in ways that caused their illness and prevented recovery. They loved life and fought for it, and were murdered by patriarchy.
I would never have chosen to be sick, and I would rather have the option of choosing how to get my income. I want to be given credit for using the experience well, for being more valuable to Lesbians than I am to patriarchy, and for having something important and true to say — something no man is going to pay me to say. I am now a worker for myself and for other Lesbians — a builder for a Lesbian-inspired future.
Endnotes
I am thankful to all the ill and disabled Lesbians who have shared valuable information, fought for recognition, and eased our isolation through writings, workshops, forums, and support groups.
This chapter is written completely from my own and friends’ experiences, but I hope in spite of this limitation it will be supportive to all Lesbians with disabilities or differences, healthy or ill, and to all poor and working-class Lesbians of every ethnicity and age.
My particular background is that of an Italian-descent factory workers’ daughter, trained in catholic schools during the 1940’s and 1950’s to be an office clerk. I did office work for several years after high school, then worked my way through college, did social work for two years to the point of physical collapse, and returned to office work. After becoming a Lesbian in 1972, I did part-time housecleaning and gardening until I became unable to work at all due to illness. I was sick with nausea and weakness throughout most of my school and working years. In that respect, I can honestly say I “tried to work it off” for more than 25 years.
December, 2014 Update
Now, at 73 years old, I’ve been chronically sick for over 32 years, and I’ve survived two very invasive kinds of cancer: clear cell adenocarcinoma of the uterus in 1993 and an unrelated neuro-endocrine colon cancer in 2002. As frightening and horrible an ordeal it was to have cancer, at least no one doubted that I was truly sick, and I received enormous support from Lesbian friends and community. With that loving support, surgery (no chemotherapy or radiation), much effort on my part, plus the unknown factors we call luck, I am still alive. It’s a medical mystery how I could recover from those cancers, yet not be able to recover from CFIDS/ME or Chemical Injury/EI/MCS. (I didn’t mention being “chemically sensitive” in 1990, because those symptoms were milder at that time. They became worse as time went on.)
Meanwhile, not only are cancer rates higher than ever because of increasing pollution by toxic chemicals, heavy metals, radioactivity (including medical treatments and over-use in medical tests), and wireless technology, but more and more people are chronically ill, often from childhood on. The spread of Lyme disease, often undiagnosed, is also adding to the numbers of chronically ill people. Thanks to the internet, there is some information and support online for those who can afford internet access and are not too electrically sensitive to use it. But the problems of disbelief, social isolation, poverty, poor health care, and lack of support I wrote about in 1990 still exist. For many disabled people, conditions have become even worse.
The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote called “Lives Worth Fighting For,” published in Rain and Thunder in their Spring 2011 issue. The article protests government cuts to in-home care for disabled people. These cuts force many into corporate-run profit driven nursing homes, even though it costs much less to pay attendants to provide better care in people’s own homes. I am adding this excerpt here because it names root causes of the ableist attitudes I wrote about 25 years ago in Dykes-Loving-Dykes.
Who Is Really a Drain on Society?
Everyone is dependent on other people, but privileged people are dependent way beyond their share. The ones with the most power, like the global corporate tyrants, are completely dependent on exploiting those of us who are poor and working class, female, racially oppressed, and/or undocumented. They hide this by reversing reality, scapegoating us by saying we are drains on society, accusing us of being lazy, greedy, untrustworthy and criminal. They also scapegoat those of us who are disabled, defining us as useless, miserable and not fit to live. They portray all of us as dehumanized things to be used and discarded.
We know that the global tyrants who run powerful corporations and governments do not expect to justify their existence or to worry that the cost of supporting their lives is a burden on society, no matter how much suffering and death they and their collaborators inflict on the rest of us and on the entire planet, and no matter how much they waste the money they steal. And they obviously do not worry about whether they contribute anything to other people’s well being.
By contrast to the global tyrants, all of the disabled Lesbians and women I’ve met contribute a lot to their communities and to the world. They are community organizers, friends, activists, writers, poets, educators and counselors, most often unpaid. Many are caregivers to lovers and friends who are more disabled than themselves. Even if someone cannot do any of these things, we still have the right to live. No one has the right to decide what the value of any disabled person’s life is, other than she herself. And I don’t know of anyone receiving In Home Support Services or other social services who instigates war, tortures people, assassinates democratically elected leaders, runs an industrial prison complex, disenfranchises voters, destroys labor unions, or creates massive environmental destruction and poisons people all over the world.
Our lives are precious. We are not here to be exploited, scapegoated or condemned to die. We are here to experience life, to love, to explore our potentials, to adventure outward and inward, to pursue happiness, and to meet the challenges of life that all people face, whether we are able bodied at the moment or whether we are disabled. Our lives are precious, and they are worth fighting for.
Sharing Health Information 