Friday, November 21, 2003
keep it in your thermometer, and out of my drinking water
According to this well-footnoted article in the Daily Mislead, Bush wants to relax environmental controls that would result a sizeable increase of airborne mercury pollution -- which filters through rain down into the ground and the water supply and the fish and all the food you eat. And, in case you didn't know, mercury is a poison that interferes with brain function.
I studied mercury poisoning in grad school when I was taking a course in environmental toxicology. Once in the ecosystem, it tends to stay there for about a generation; it doesn't clean up easily. It affects children the most, because it interferes with their development; in sufficient amounts it can cause developmental disabilities, such as those that occurred in Minimata, Japan, in the middle of the last century. The effect is cumulative. Fish tend to store mercury in their fat layer, next to the skin; if you are unsure of the waters where your fish came from, scrape off the fat before cooking it (especially with fish like Great Lakes-caught salmon that have a higher fat level) and that will help a great deal. I would not worry about East Coast salmon, overall, as much as bass and other freshwater fish, since salmon spend most of their lives out at sea.
Why am I concentrating on the East Coast here? That's where everything up to the Rockies will end up, thanks to the way the wind patterns work. The bill concerns airborne mercury, which will stay in the air a while before it is rained out. I am not sure, offhand, how long, but the effect is likely to be stronger anywhere east of where the mercury hits the atmosphere, depending on prevailing winds. After that, it will go into the Mississippi watershed, which is basically the central third of the country, concentrating in fish and animals native to the Big Muddy, and on the other side of the Appalachian mountains, toward and into the Atlantic.
This issue is still undecided, in the air as it were; if I find anyone who is conducting an online campaign, I'll post the information here. Otherwise, contact your congresscritters and make appropriate appalled noises.
11/21/2003 10:57:00 AM
that which is holy needs no defense
Re Bush's statement on the sanctity of marriage:
That which is sacred and sanctified needs no human defense. If something is holy, it looks after itself. Part of looking after itself includes attracting to it the people who need it and want it and who should be part of it.
Therefore, the whole flurry of Bushly effort to remove the possibility of people being considered married that he doesn't want to be considered married just points up the Bushly bigotry.
I'm going to go out on a considerable limb here and talk about the words 'holy' and 'sanctified', because I think they need to be reclaimed for what they are and not for what the Religious Right wants them to be.
Holy -- whole -- wholesome -- healthy. A derivative of the Old English hal, which means hale, healthy, free from injury, according to the compact Oxford English Dictionary on the sewing machine behind me. Holy doesn't necessarily mean godly. It means complete. When we come together as people with one another, when we let our real selves show and treat each other with kindness, we create a holy situation. It doesn't matter whether you believe in a deity or not. It's the same as eating wholesome food or feeling healthy. It's a word that describes goodness.
I think two people who commit to sharing each other's lives are creating goodness and doing a holy thing, a wholesome and hale and hearty thing that makes them and those around them a bit more healthy and whole. That's what relationships are, or should be, and that includes parents and children and married couples and longtime companions and permanent housemates and however else you want to describe it. It's holy, okay? It creates a greater goodness. You don't have to believe in a deity to see this.
Sacred, sanctified -- from the Old French sacre, whose obsolete meaning is "of twofold formation" (again the compact OED), with the primary later meaning of consecrating the elements of a Mass, or transubstantiation (I am paraphrasing the eight inches of 2 pt. type in the OED here). I doubt this is what Bush means, since his particular branch of Christianity considers the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation to be about as real as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The next meaning is "esteemed very dear or acceptable to a deity." (In other words, flawless and perfect.)
And there we find the difficulty with the Bushly attitude, as Bush doesn't think people who want to live with others of their own gender are acceptable to his version of deity.
I believe with all my heart that people who love each other and are committed to each other's welfare are certainly acceptable to any deity worth the worship. The God/dess I know and love is delighted when people love one another enough to make this kind of commitment, because if God is love, then wherever there is love God is already present. (Look that up in the First Letter of John, Mr. Bush.)
(Reader, forgive me for reverting to the shorter form of the word; there is not, in English, as far as I've found, a reasonable everyday word that indicates deity by name without declaration of gender -- if there were I'd be using it. Besides, I was quoting.)
God/dess is not going to reject my cousin and her spouse for being women any more than my friends D and J would be rejected for being men who have shared their lives for longer than I've been married.
Mr. Bush, your god is too small-minded, and seems to be created in your image rather than the other way around. Your god appears unwilling to look above the waist to see into the truth of people's lives, whereas mine looks at the heart and the mind and the intentions. Either way, you do nobody any honor by this small-minded idiocy.
Any action that creates hatred, bigotry and enhances prejudice is not acceptable to deity -- and I think that goes for deity under any name I've ever run across, whether we're talking the Lord and Lady or Jesus or Allah or Krishna or Gitchie Manitou or Cernunos or Mithras or Apollo or anyone else.
Which begs the question: what deity is Bush hoping to please by this?
11/21/2003 10:53:00 AM
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