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| A Nation of Holy Hot Air |
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| an Erie vote on fluoridation |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 02, 2008. The town of Erie, just south of Boulder, had an election yesterday, and they decided by a slim margin that it was okay for their water to be fluoridated. I remember the 1950’s, though, and I remember the initial horror that the government was forcing innocent people to drink chemicals in public water supplies no matter where you went. It was that issue that concerned the conservatives of that era as it does the Libertarians and Greenie variants of our own. Over time, fluoridation seemed to win. Our dental health improved, and the many dangers of improper dental care buttressed the decision. Bacterial infections in the mouth can affect the heart and brain, mental depression, overall energy, and life span. Fluoridation helped with a lot of that, more impressive given the huge increase in sugar intake and food in general during the same years. But, it always seemed that the people concerned with forced fluoridation easily socialized with UFO abductees, and if not actually crazy themselves had at least three family members institutionalized and/or members of the John Birch Society, the Michigan Militia, or the Minute Men. We’ve come, though, to realize how little we actually understand, and that the Law of Unintended Consequences had not been repealed with World War Two food rationing. We didn’t and don’t actually know what happened with long time fluoridation to our bodies because it had never been tested previous to implementation, nor could it have been. Of course, we were now living so much longer it would be difficult to convince the population fluoridation was bad because it contributed to making our bones weak in our nineties. Similar issues surround forced immunization shots for children. Some parents and doctors feel that autism might actually be caused by agents in the injections. Even if so, more got ill from not being inoculated. Okay. But then, I’m not a parent wracked with guilt and anger because my child is maimed for life, perhaps dead. Easy for me. I’ve long been convinced that too much of this nation is based on air, by which I mean the mere contention by the federal government that our dollar is worth what it says, that people actually understand economics and the stock market makes sense. We take for granted various oaths by public officials and our soldiers, our doctors and our lawyers. It’s no house of cards, but it is a lot more fragile than we sometimes appreciate. It’s all hot air, to a degree, but holy hot air in a way, because when that trust between the government and people is shattered, we’re in big trouble, and only foolish, malicious, or incompetent people would risk it. And in the year 2000, we elected an entire slate of them. Most of us think that our courts, for all their faults, are a good thing and justice mostly wins. But for the last couple of decades, we’ve seen innocent people executed for crimes they did not commit, and those who prevented evidence from coming forth or who deliberately destroyed it are not themselves charged with murder. Most of us have assumed that within certain understandable parameters, the government is on top of safety issues and when the heavy winds blow, help will be there quick and efficiently. But we’ve seen Katrina’s residue, and we’ve seen and paid for mobile homes left unused and unsafe to boot. We shipped ice around the nation for months that could have saved lives, and finally let it melt. Gets hot in the Bayou. And oversight costs money not being allocated. For most of our lives we complained about government regulations, but with the Thalidomide catastrophe in Britain in the 60’s, we grew more aware there are reasons for keeping drugs off the market for more testing. And we retain belief that American drug manufacturers, those Templars of the free marketplace, would not sell us drugs essentially untested at all, and in any case, they nicely tell us to chat about it with a doctor first before using it. We don’t know what financial connections there are between the doctors and the company, though, and few would ask. In short, we’re not so much a nation ruled by law as a nation composed of promises. For the most part, they’ve been honored. But to an accelerated degree, they’re being broken, and we’re letting it happen, letting it fall away. Our current federal government has tried to make torture legal, and has not funded our domestic oversight entities, and left safety and oversight in the hands of the industries themselves. This week alone, two major drugs have been taken off the air because they don’t work as advertised. The public was lied to, people may have died, and as in the same ways of those who hid or withheld exculpatory evidence in capital cases taken to term, nobody will be charged with a crime. It’s been five months, and I never can recall if I mentioned this, but I did a piece on Mouse Bradshaw that, because of her passing during a pledge drive, wasn’t broadcast, but it’s been up on my site as if it had been, for October 20, 2007 with transcript and recording. As always, these are my opinions and not necessarily this station’s. |
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