abbieonline's Journal

Diet boo hoo
Nov 09 2009 23:26

I definitely went on a soapbox and ranted in this article -- definitely was going through an unhappy time -- so I changed the title accordingly!] 

In today's society we have allowed ourselves to separate further and further from nature, until our lives have become only scattered remnants of the agrarian lifestyles known only a few generations before.

In this modern machine age, we have become addicted in an increasingly parasitic relationship to the voluminous number of conveniences that we have created for ourselves. Among them are motorized transportation, electric power, running water and prepackaged foods that need simply be picked up at the local supermarket.

We don't always think that "natural" is better. Many of us would have no idea what to do if we were stuck in the woods or if our electricity and water were shut off for a few days.

We have grown increasingly reliant on the multitudes of conveniences that society has provided for us, and there does not appear to be any end in sight - although the y2k computer bug might certainly give us a new crack at it.

So let's talk about us. Many of us still prefer the flavor-enhanced, sugar and MSG-laden foods now available in our stores to the simplicity and health of brown rice, raw vegetables, beans and nuts.

We much prefer to drink Diet Coke as opposed to regular water, and one soda commercial from a few years back implied that "When dogs get thirsty, they drink water. When humans get thirsty, they drink Squirt."

The deeper implications of that statement are that it is somehow beneath us to drink ordinary water - that we are somehow "too advanced" to drink something so plain and uninteresting. How many times have you heard someone say that they cannot drink "regular water" because it "has no taste?" Come on now, be honest - it might have been you saying those things at one time, too.

It is no wonder that so many of us are coming down with chronic degenerative diseases such as cancer. We squander away the time that our bodies require to heal themselves with our addictions to being awake.

We somehow convince ourselves that we "don't have time" to sleep, only budgeting six hours a night for ourselves, and if unexpected situations arise we may get even less.

"THE BOX"

We bind ourselves into an endless system of "wage slavery" where we work forty or fifty hours a week in a box. We also travel to work in a box, leaving our own box at home to go to another box.

Then at lunchtime we go to yet another box, to get away from the box or cubicle that we normally work in.

Then it's back into our horribly expensive mobile box to once again drive home, and return to our own private box where everything is safe.

We are then entertained by yet another box made of glass, where dancing colors arrange themselves into the images of human faces that give us the illusion that we are really engaging in social contact with others, when in fact we are just further replicating our pattern of boxed-in isolation.

And so, to what degree have we boxed ourselves in to a life that society has mandated for us?

To what degree do we accept the proclamations of the media / political / corporate hierarchy and its demands upon us?

We are taught that our purpose in life is to consume, to store more nuts and trinkets in our little box just like all good chipmunks do.

We are taught that beauty is a 36-24-36 female body with bulging silicon-formed breasts and a rippling, well-muscled male form that few can achieve without dedicating their very lives to that pursuit.

And yet paradoxically, we are also taught that there is no finer pleasure than to sink our teeth into a product comprised of processed bovine flesh, refined sugars, cheeses and greases. Furthermore, we need to make sure that we can purchase these grease packets for literally pennies on the dollar, in order that we might get a "good value."

We are horrified at the idea of trying to make our own clothing when we can go to the thrift shop and pick out a bargain for less than a dollar, or to the mall to get the latest fashion for a hundred dollars.

If we had to weave a piece of cloth ourselves, we wouldn't even know where to begin.

Many of us are so entrenched into our "box" mentality that we might only actually spend a few precious minutes outdoors each day, dodging from one air conditioner to another from our favorite parking spot, always as close to the main door as we can possibly get.

We can hardly conceive of what life would be like without the massive machine organism that we have built up around ourselves and continue to live off of each day.

We don't like to admit to the fact that the machine is killing us. When we have positions of power in major corporations, it is much easier to turn the other cheek and allow whatever environmental disasters must be committed to go on unabated.

After all, the only measurement for the success of a corporation is profit. The more profit a corporation makes, the more of a success it is, and if it fails to profit then desperate measures must be taken.

Look on a map of South America and study the largest country, Brazil. If your map gives you the names of cities and the locations of major highways, you will notice something interesting.

The vast majority of Brazil has very few highways and no established cities, while only the outskirts, especially near the Atlantic coast, serve as host to modern civilization. The economic situations in Brazil have significantly deteriorated several times in a row.

Brazilian coin currency that once carried great spending power is now worth practically nothing, unless you have squirreled away an entire fishbowl full of it. With the lack of profit as such a pressing issue, Brazil is driven to desperate measures in order to survive.

And so, when we actually stop and think, we realize that the entire center of Brazil with no highways and no cities is host to a unique world ecosystem - the rainforest. Satellite photos from space still show this area as being lush and green.

Much of the rainforest has simply never seen human interference or habitation, since it has been around even longer than we have. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of species of animal, bird, amphibian and insect remain undiscovered.

And, perhaps more importantly, entire phyla of plant life have yet to be discovered and cataloged. We simply have no idea what is in there, because so far no one has made the degree of massive effort that it would take to find out.

Since the Brazilian economy has had so many hard knocks, they are desperate for profit and will do whatever it takes. As a result, loggers are allowed to clear and destroy these rainforests at levels that can easily exceed four football fields per day.

The trees that once stood the test of time for thousands and thousands of years are now converted into wood, which forms our furniture pieces and buildings that we inevitably dispose of in well under 100 years.

Anything that lasts longer than that is referred to by us as an "antique," and we might spend a little more money to acquire it before wear and tear renders it completely valueless to us, and then off to the garbage dump or Salvation Army it goes.

Remember what we said about cancer? Our current society has built-in a variety of institutionalized systems that appear to demand our participation. Hardly anyone can imagine what you mean if you tell them that you do not own or watch a television.

They eyeball you with furtive glances of skepticism, scorn and derision if you skip the pizza, hamburgers or ice cream cake.

They await your opinions on meaningless news and media tidbits, and they stare at you as if you are from another planet when you regretfully tell them that you have no idea what they are talking about.

They are horrified when they go to the doctor and are told that they have tumors, and all of a sudden they start to become aware that something is dreadfully wrong with this whole system.

But because they can't think on such a multidimensional level, they still might miss the point and collapse into a desperate, self-pitying fear, never realizing the responsibility that they had in creating their illness through their tacit participation in a wildly dysfunctional system.

All the knowledge that we need to combat cancer and other degenerative diseases is available to us now. But since our society as a whole has not assimilated this knowledge, we continue to have the same problems.

If we don't allow our bodies time to heal by sleeping eight hours a night, if we don't give them the combination of fresh, natural foods, clean and clear water, exercise and sunlight, if we indulge in worry, hate and fear instead of positive emotions such as grace, beauty and joy, we are headed down a road that looks increasingly bleak and dismal as we move ahead.

We don't really understand why white flour, red meat, refined sugar, dairy and prepackaged, preservative-laden foods can be so bad, since we are brainwashed day after day with the idea that these are the very nuts that we, as chipmunks, must harvest into our own little box.

Our opinions are so cleverly marketed by the brightest advertising think tanks in the world that we are convinced that life just wouldn't be the same without Flavor Burst chewing gum and a Domino's Pizza on the weekends.

We don't handle the concept of the y2k bug very well, because we are so indoctrinated into the Machine that we can hardly think of it ceasing to be.

No one is really preparing yet, because the Machine is just too all-pervasive to even imagine that it would no longer be there. Cigarette fiends and alcoholics have probably never once thought about what it would be like if they simply could not satisfy their addictions at the local stores anymore.

No alcoholic talks about stockpiling beer, because they simply have never thought that far ahead, and would probably end up drinking all of their storage anyway - it is unfathomable to think that it might actually disappear.

Few people ever really think about the fact that we are on a one-to-one level of food production; in other words, as soon as we make it, we consume it. Hardly any of our modern automated farm equipment is y2k compatible, and if supply lines are compromised, we just might not have even the most basic conveniences that we have come to rely upon anymore.

Our eyes are dazzled by the television, and we can hardly imagine what life would be like if we reached for the remote and nothing happened. We might very well start pacing the floor in a manic, stir-crazed frenzy if all of our TV's died, having no idea what to do with all of our suddenly free time.

It would probably take us a few days to realize that we could actually go for a walk outside or spend time with our children.

Our appetites demand the sweetest, greasiest, poorest foods, and we are completely unwilling to give them up, as they are so near and dear to us. We love our air-conditioning so much that it is almost unfathomable to think of living anywhere that didn't have it.

Most of us have never conceived of what it would be like to wake up one day and have no hot water, or even better yet, no running water whatsoever. The microwave and electric stove are such a given that we have never stopped to consider trying to live without them.

So, if we can briefly separate ourselves from the world that we now see all around us and look in on our present situation, we discover something interesting. We have essentially built up an artificial planet and tried to superimpose it over the natural world that we started with. Huge buildings of glass and metal press down on the Earth's bosom with an oppressive weight.

Concrete slabs have replaced soft green grass and loamy black soil, and long strips of pavement have sealed and covered over carefully wrought cobblestone roads and dusty old carriage trails.

Even railroad tracks are now almost a forgotten memory, and if we were to take an Amtrak ride cross-country we are surprised to see the dangling, barren skeletons of brick buildings and train stations that once fueled a nation -- now the empty shells of a forgotten age whose windows are used as target practice for enterprising youths with a handful of rocks and a good pitching arm.

Indeed, some of the more outspoken social commentators have spoken of our modern concrete jungles as being the cancers upon the Earth, and we do need to stop and think that one over for a few minutes. After all, a cancer is nothing more than a foreign growth, an area of the body where the cells start to proliferate too quickly.

We have vast tracts of arable, usable land, and yet we herd ourselves into coastal cities where we are packed in like sardines. To those of us who live in these cities, very little remains of the world we once knew. Trees are delegated to little more than sapling size, framed in brick-enforced concrete squares and laden with the droppings of herds of desperate birds.

Even the majesty of our blue skies and clean air is marred by the harsh, lingering reality of an ever-persistent smog that reeks of urine, garbage and diesel truck exhaust.

The chirping of birds, rustling of leaves in the wind, peeping of frogs, cacophony of crickets and howling of Great Horned Owls have been replaced by the barely-audible noises of televisions and voices in the apartments surrounding us, the soft coo of armies of hungry pigeons, the angry rush of automotive engines and ceaseless clamor of car alarms, explosively loud stereos that shatter their way down the street, and insistent honking horns that hammer at our tired minds and hearts.

How is it that we can be surrounded with so many of our fellow human beings, and yet in our own little compartment of the egg crate, we feel so alone and isolated?

Are we just another larva, locked into our own cell of the honeycomb and unwilling to see the hive itself for what it really is?

Do we really have the autonomy and control over our lives that we believe should be present, or are we more appropriately suited for slavery to a system that is so all-pervasive that we don't even realize that we are slaves in the first place?

Do we actually allow our self-indulgence to be so great that we continue to inhale benzene, dioxins and carbon monoxide, simply because the marketing machine convinced us that it was "cool" for us to get hooked on cigarettes?

Do we ever stop and think about the fact that it is very profitable for us to be hooked, because we pay through the nose to kill ourselves and then pay even more when it finally catches up on us as the inevitable fade to black in the hospital or nursing home?

The doctors and nurses and scientists will all tell you that we have longer lifetimes than any other society in history. But the key to understanding that sentence is that what they really mean is any other Western society in history.

For you see, other specialists then turn around and study a tribe of indigenous peoples without our modern niceties, and discover to their surprise that their average natural lifespan is 120 years - almost twice what we claim for ourselves.

A 90-year old man from these societies could outclimb the star athlete of our high school soccer team on everything from the shallowest to the steepest mountains, and yet to us the idea of "90 Years Old" conjures up images of nursing homes, stale white rooms, Depends undergarments, bibs and blender-processed baby food that is spoon-fed by a bored attendant waiting for her next cigarette break, wearing a little too much makeup to hide the creeping dark pigment under her own eyes from her ongoing self-induced liver and kidney damage.

Several of our generations in the past, a group of profit-minded individuals chose to reinterpret a particular line of Biblical scripture to come to the conclusion that God wanted us to "Subdue the earth."

Little did they realize that this statement was metaphorical, having more to do with our need to control the animal portions of ourselves to then let the spiritual side flow through. Only when we can get a handle on our physical bodies do we then have an opportunity to allow our mental and spiritual bodies to truly blossom into fruition.

But as long as we continue to watch TV, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, cut back on sleep and eat junk food, we are happily securing our seat on the rollercoaster ride that will speed us down the inevitable descending spiral that delivers cancer, disease and death to our doorstep.

As we continue to gulp down white bread that is no more nutritious than styrofoam, heavy meats that might just as well be covered with blue-white slime mold, dairy and cheese products that just as easily could be Elmer's Glue and sodas that are no more nutritious than used motor oil, we have to wonder why we remain so unhealthy.

As we continue to live inside artificial environments supported by air conditioners whose filters might not have been changed for years at a time, we have to wonder why our oxygen-deprived systems peter out on us.

As we continue to relentlessly drive ourselves through meaningless jobs simply to stay alive, is it any wonder that we have an increasing disenchantment with life, drinking ourselves into nightly oblivion and screaming at our spouses about how much of an asshole they are? How do we keep fit like webcam girls at this tube!

Where is the joy, the peace, the glory of simply being alive? Why do we insist on treating ourselves as somehow being separate entities from nature - entities that must completely redesign their own systems of food, travel, commerce, housing, education and love?

Can we continue to survive and prosper in a civilization whose only universal God is the almighty dollar, where the hardened casts of concrete and pavement effectively seal over the life-giving forces of nature that sustain us?

Indeed, how can we go on in such blindness, such disease and disaster, without having some kind of major awakening?