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Do you find that every day niceties are disappearing?  Kindness is interpreted as weakness?  A neurosurgeon I worked with asked me one day if a chair was taken.  “Is it ok if I sit here?”  I told him he was at the top of the food chain and he could sit anywhere he wanted.  We both gave a short chuckle and went on with our day.  That moment stayed in my mind.   He is an example of many memorable encounters with kind people who inspire me to be as they are.  I’m still working on it.

Politeness is different.  Some people can be caustically polite.  You’ve met them, the soft spoken smiling face that gossips with tact.  Kind people are aware of others while grocery shopping, moving aside, or yielding to the product search of a fellow shopper.  They don’t always wave or smile so they can be hard to discover sometimes, but, what a beautiful world this would be if we would all learn from them.

Kind people don’t do things out a sense of reward, they are just innately so.  I think we should celebrate kindness rather than war and death and sacrifice.

I hate self check out lanes with every thing I’m made of.  That is a job that someone doesn’t have because you are checking your own stuff out.  The automated cashier is telling me to have a nice day?  That is bullshit –> which is a phrase I have used while walking out the door without buying my cart full of stuff.

A large home supplies store recently had four self checking lanes open and one cocky employee announcing to all of us customers floundering at the self checkouts. “I got it all under control baby”  I asked miss “control baby” if someone was sent home early, and wages were lost because of those self checking lanes.  She pretended to be too busy to answer my question.

While touring Oregon, I noticed that every gas station had an attendant to pump your gas for you and the gas didn’t cost more.  It was to keep people working.  Did you know that at one time it was unheard of to pump your own gas?  How long will it be before people find out that at one time it was unheard of to check out your own stuff.  Maybe we’ll think about it while sitting in unemployment lines.  We’ll have automated nurses, police and loan officers.

Did you know that Monsanto (the same company that brought us agent orange) together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer controls almost all agriculture in the World?  They are like drug suppliers except they are in the seed business.  Ever wonder why the fruits and vegetables at grocery stores are so big and plump and colorful compared to the fruits and veggies at farmers markets?  Monsanto adds stuff, pesticides and they have created hybrid seeds that the farmers have to buy.  They have a contract. Small farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when they violate any terms of the contract.  Drug suppliers send out heavies that break your arms and Monsanto sends out heavies in the form of lawyers that break your family.

Independently owned farms are actually corporate farms as long as they use Monsanto seeds.  This is a fact of life in the US and we have grown accustomed to our giant red and yellow produce. Literature tells us to eat colorful food to be healthy.  Many Americans are wising up and going to farmers markets and food co-ops to avoid the pesticides and antibiotics and fungicides like Thiram that are added to Monsanto seeds to make stuff look better.  We have hospitals full of antibiotic resistant diseases and cancer.  Do you think there is any relation?

I had my own garden many years ago when I was pregnant with my son.  We had the good fortune of renting a little Wisconsin farmette that had been abandoned for many years after the owners died.  We washed the house and painted it.  We took the 10 year old cow crap that was in the barn and put a little clump at the bottom of every hole and put seeds and starter plants in the bottom.  It was a small town and people took pride in their gardens.  This garden was my first and my neighbors were full of wonderful advice.  I wrapped my tomato plants with newspaper to prevent pests, I picked off the little sucker growths, and I planted as they advised to make sure the tallness of the corn didn’t block out the sunlight to the lower plants.  We had a pear tree, an apple tree, and a concord grape vine.

I had a basement full of potatoes, giant red tomatoes, squash, peppers, melon and everything was huge and colorful.  My take on all of this is we buy the cow poop from organic ranchers and pay Wisconsin farm wives to teach us how to grow stuff.   Then we won’t need seeds with scary additives.

Meantime, I read an article in “Yes” magazine…

Monsanto has donated to Haiti some of their hybrid corn seeds.  These seeds are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram.  Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs).  Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. The EPA also ruled that pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, based on the assumption that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing. Dress like an astronaut to do your gardening?

The concern of Haitian social movements is not just about chemical dangers and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local seeds for local consumption—otherwise known as food sovereignty. Monsanto’s arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to such a future.

Vía Campesina, the world’s largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the “principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples.” They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs.

In the United States –>The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge against Monsanto that has just made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety’s case on April 27 3010. The Supreme Court lifted a nationwide ban on the planting of genetically engineered alfalfa seeds, despite claims they might harm the environment.

Go to

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/beverly-bell-in-haiti/haitian-farmers-refuse-monsanto-hybrid-seeds

and

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/food-rebellions-7-steps-to-solving-the-food-crisis

and this entry by Jr Deputy Accountant where I stole this picture from

http://www.jrdeputyaccountant.com/2010/06/psst-any-victory-for-frankenscience.html

if you’d like to read the entire article and others like it.

Soldiers going off to wars to die for some cause.  What a strange world we have created.  We get feelings of pride and gratification or at least a feeling of safety from their sacrifices.  I wish we had a world where, no one ever has to endure the impending doom soldiers in war face everyday. I hate the idea of someone dying for my safety.  I wish extremists of every form would just bring it down a notch.  Go hug a baby or something.  Back off the medication or take more — or something.

Being good is insurance for when you’re dumb — Alexis Ohanian

“Don’t be Evil” — Google