Bugs, Stink Trees and Terrorism

I co-exist with insects and don't even bat an eye anymore. No more flinching or gasping when a bug alights on me or my book or my dinner plate. It's just plain weird!

The ladybugs descended upon me today. There must be 30 of them swarming the ceiling right inside my back door -- the sunny side of the house. I thought we were going to get away with a slow ladybug year. Dang. I haven't even vacuumed-out the light fixtures from last fall yet! The stink bugs have been here for a while. One insists on batting itself all along the ceiling every evening that I sit here and write. It's incredibly annoying, yet after so much co-habitation, I can tune it out. I even had a wasp in my kitchen today and just said hello to it like it belonged here. (It's dead now. I can't ignore a wasp.) This is abnormal, but no DDT, please.

We need a good, hard freeze -- and a long, cold winter. The last few winters have been so sissy'ish that neither the bugs nor the weeds have been put in their places. There's something amiss with our earth.

We have another invader here in the Mid-Atlantic -- the stink tree, aka the "ghetto palm" -- from China. It grows everywhere and you can't kill it. It seems to be a host for the stink bugs. My neighbor diligently cut down a small forest of them between our properties last winter -- but there's a whole new grove a-growing -- about 6' in height already. They're taking over our National Forest! We imported the tree, imported the stink bugs and imported the lady bugs ... and the Kudzu, originally from Japan -- that blankets our forests and kills the the trees from lack of sunlight. How dumb. When will we learn!?

I recently learned about an issue with our wheat -- by "our," I mean the United States. We have a lot of mouths to feed -- so have genetically modified our crops to produce abundantly. We know about the possible negative effects of hormonally modifed corn and milk -- and now wheat. Something with the gluten or complex carbohydrates and the big American weight gain. This pertains to whole wheat, too -- so just when we think we're doing well with our whole grain diets, we could be getting fatter and fatter. I don't think organic wheat is excluded from this mess. There's possibly a link to diabetes, of course. This even means that American beer could be more fattening than imports! I wonder if this is all true.

My husband had brain cancer. Why? Sure, there are other cancers in his family -- mostly on his mother's side. An uncle died from Pancreatic Cancer. Another had bladder cancer. But why brain cancer? Was it caused by his cell phone? You know, I have to wonder ... his last tumor was right above his right ear -- right where he held his phone. For nearly 15 years, the cause of his brain cancer was contemplated, from time to time, here at the Bailey home. He wasn't a big Diet Coke drinker -- so Aspartame probably wasn't the culprit. We didn't live under massive power lines. We did live near a proving ground for many years -- Quantico. What were they doing over there? Was it just plain old genetics? or are we humans really messing things up? What's in our water? What's in the air we breathe? What the heck are we eating!?

We were barely making ends meet as young parents so we couldn't afford an organic diet. (Organic farms can't feed America anyway ... so the lucky ones are weeded-out economically -- pun intended. That stinks, too.) Of course I wanted my babies to have the best, safest foods -- but I also wanted them to be clothed and warm -- and have healthcare. We couldn't have it all! So we ate "traditionally," not organically. Thankfully, it appears that our kids are healthy -- neither having enormous feet or out-of-balance hormones. What's a mom to do? Well, I limited certain substances from their diets. No hotdogs or cured meats were eaten in MY house. Sure, the odd hotdog when we were out and about was allowed -- like a ballgame or something -- and a lovely Easter ham -- but otherwise, nope. Sodium Nitrites are KNOWN to be a cause of childhood Leukemia. If they cause Leukemia, doesn't it make sense that they can cause other cancers? What if my kids have the cancer gene??? I'm not going to knowingly feed it!

David forbid me to allow "fear" to be a tactic in our living. I really respect and appreciate that. Following 911, I was fearful. We lived just south of DC -- a prime escape route should a larger attack have been levied on Washington -- and close enough to be directly affected by a terrorist act on the nation's capital. I kept an emergency food cache in the back of my soccer-mom van for months until he insisted that I dismantle it and stop living fearfully. (Good grief ... didn't he understand that I lived every day in fear because of his illness? ... but he meant a different kind of fear.) Looking back, I was a bit of a stranger to myself. I suffered from hives for many weeks following the attacks on New York and DC, and later awaiting Anthrax to descend upon my community. How glad I was to have that fear alleviated by my amazing husband who had lived through war in Lebanon. Why wasn't he afraid? (Because Love Wins, right?) He refused to discard his cell phone, too. Invaders ... terror, viruses, bugs ... cancer.

So then what do we do to address cancer? We treat it with poison. According to Wikipedia, "The most common chemotherapy agents act by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of most cancer cells. This means that chemotherapy also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract, and hair follicles. This results in the most common side-effects of chemotherapy: myelosuppression (decreased production of blood cells, hence also immunosuppression), mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract), and alopecia (hair loss)." David took a host of a whole lot of other medications, too, some of which really caused some trouble -- like bone loss and chronic rashes, just to name a couple. I still have a bagful of old pills that I have yet to dispose of -- probably thousands of dollars' worth. I already gave a couple grand's worth of chemo pills to the University and over $500 of blood thinner syringes to a medical mission. Chemotherapy and all its grand side effects didn't kill David -- but they might have. He surely suffered from it. And he feared it.

I think that cancer, heart disease and diabetes are greater terror threats to us than anything else. They have a hugely negative impact on the American family -- on our day to day lives -- from pain and suffering, financial devastation and the undefinable grief from loss of loved ones. I certainly don't mean to diminish the horror of lives lost in terrorist attacks or wars -- but cancer kills over 1,500 Americans every day; Diabetes is attributed to about 75,000 U.S. deaths per year and nearly 1,000,000 are caused by heart disease. These numbers are staggering. What is the answer? I am not making a political statement -- I haven't watched the debates -- I am an Independent and have no party loyalties -- but I really think we ought to spend a hell of a lot more time, energy and money on figuring out how to be better stewards of our planet and of ourselves -- to stop poisoning our earth, water and each other. A whole lot of healing has to happen if we're going to continue as a people. Who or what are the real invaders?