Monday, March 30, 2009

Good Intentions

Well it happened again as it inevitably will from time to time. The question: "Raw vegan, huh? What do you eat? Grass?" Sometimes I play along, and say: "Yeah, I steal from bird feeders, or I graze on my front lawn." And, of course, this is not the persons fault who doesn't know how they would eat if everything didn't come cooked, wrapped, boxed and packaged, but rather it is the fault of the good-intentioned.
It seems as though the more social developers try to make our life "better", the more it gets screwed up. I'm thinking of Monsanto, bioengineering food to produce more food than we ever could organically. If we could control nature, we could feed millions of more people. Good intentions, right? Disastrous results. I'm thinking of fish farming. Same thing. I'm thinking about scientists torturing billions of non-human animals in experiments in a desire to cure diseases nobody needs to have been afflicted with if they ate properly in the first place. I'm thinking about the debate on universal health care. Great idea, right? To me, it sounds like health care cooked, wrapped, boxed and packaged. The idea seems to be, lets all pay billions of dollars into a pool, and the people who are healthy will pay for those who get sick. Nice idea, right? But, is this the dog trying to catch its tail. Government (our taxes) give subsidies to the factory farms like Monsanto and Archer-Daniels Midland etc.; companies that make people sick in the first place, then we pay the government health insurance money, which in turn pays the medical and pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile, nobody is cured from anything. All of this is done with "good" intentions.
When people fool with Gods' natural laws bad things happen. I'll try to tell a story that I heard from Pragata a Qigong teacher.
God was walking the Earth a long time ago, and came upon a farmer surveying his farm. God said,"Behold your many blessings and wonderful bounty."
And the Farmer said, "God you sure know a lot about the Earth and all it's many creatures, but you don't know anything about farming."
And God said, "Why do you say this?"
The Farmer said, "Throughout the year it is a struggle. Sometimes it will not rain when I need rain, and my fields go dry. Sometimes all it does is rain, and my fields are flooded. Many of the insects you have created eat my stocks and leaves leaving my plants barren.
If you would give control of these forces to me, I will show you how to farm."
So, God agreed and gave the Farmer the ability to control the weather and the insects. And so it was, when the Farmer needed rain, it rained. When he needed sun, the sun shone brightly. And, not an insect ate from a single plant.
The Farmer was very pleased, as it looked to be his most bountiful harvest ever!
Then God appeared to the Farmer and said, "Bring me a shaft of wheat so I can see your handy work." So the Farmer bent down to pull a shaft of wheat, but the wheat disintegrated in his hand. He then raced to other plants on his farm, and sure enough, they crumpled in his hand.
The Farmer said, "I don't understand! everything was perfect. "
And God said, "You took away the struggle which contains the life force from your farm. Everything was perfect so the plants didn't need to be strong, so they withered and died in your hand.

As a t.v. commercial once put it: "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature". They were selling margarine, which was later found to make people sicker than butter.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Me Man Very Smart

I'm dealing with my first runner's injury: tendinitis in my ankle. Consequently, I have had to take three days off from running. I had planned to run a 5k race this coming weekend, and have already payed for it, so I am hopeful that I'll be good enough to go.
I am icing, and believe it or not,even stretching to help the ankle. I read that this particular injury needs proper rest or it can become a chronic problem. So, in my warped world, three days is proper rest. We'll see.

I wanted to write about a story in the news I read the other day. It was about a caged monkey in a zoo that stored up rocks in the morning to throw at people later in the day. Now the geniuses in the science & news world were amazed that this monkey was able to plan his rock throwing idea ahead of time.
Hundreds of thousands of years living with monkeys on this planet, and they think that's a discovery? Boy, you know we are out of touch with nature and our natural world when this is news.
My basset hound knows when I leave for work in the morning so he can get on the couch. And, he knows what time my wife wakes up so he can jump off. A miracle!!!
Of course, they never asked: "What could be upsetting this monkey?"
I don't know, maybe he doesn't want to live the rest of his life caged and exploited!!!
Maybe this little playground they built for him doesn't come remotely close to the life he should be living. Maybe after throwing his feces at passersby for a long time, he finally thought, "I'm going to throw something heavier at these meatballs, they don't seem to get it!"
They've probably already honored his ingenuity by dissecting his brain.
Lord help us.