Saturday, December 15, 2012

Saturday Stories: There's only one this week.

And it's short.

It's Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece on yesterday's tragedy.

Please read it.

Bookmark and Share

Posted by Yoni Freedhoff at 5:30 AM

Labels:

2 comments:

  1. This is the difference between the USA and China:

    http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2012/12/2012121481220620325.html

    ReplyDelete

  2. Excerpt from The Crazy Makers by Carol Simontacchi:

    Publicly the tales of our mental lives are told in the accounts that splash across the front pages of our newspapers about school shootings or violence in the workplace. We read about them when the latest test scores of students are released or when a politician or panel of experts holds a town hall discussion or conducts a study about the safety of our neighbourhoods and the societal issues plaguing America. They are apparent, too, when a new psychoactive medication achieves FDA approval, and a marketing campaign begins with advertisements in magazines and TV commercials that include an ever-present roll of side effects.
    More often the most poignant stories of our mental lives are told in conversations along the sidelines of soccer and baseball fields and over backyard fences, as mothers compare stories of their teenagers or whisper the secrets of their own fears and depressions. These are the stories of the men and women, teenagers, and children who struggle to maintain an emotional balance but often succumb to feelings of despair. They struggle with their school work because they can't remember or focus. They fight anger that bubbles up from nowhere and scalds the people they love most dearly.
    Millions of people can't get their mental lives together. Sometimes they resort to violence and seem driven to live life on the edge of destruction, but most often they suffer in silence. They are the 'walking wounded' who seem destined to fail or fall short in life because their minds cannot think properly." http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Makers-Industry-Destroying-Children/dp/1585426261#reader_1585426261

    In light of the above, consider this excerpt from the Introduction to Food for Nought by Ross Hume Hall, PhD.

    "Nourishment of the American populace has undergone a startling transformation since World War II. A highly individual system of growing and marketing food has been transformed into a gigantic, highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated products. This phenomenon is not peculiar to the American scene and occurs in every industrialized country. The United States, however, has progressed furthest in the transformation. Man can never be more than what he eats, and one would expect that a phenomenon with such profound effects on health and wellbeing as a radically changed system of supplying nourishment would be thoroughly documented and assessed by the scientific community. Such is not the case. The transformation has gone unmarked by government agencies and learned bodies. Government agencies, recipients of the public trust, charged with protecting and improving the public's food, operate as if the technology of food fabrication rested in pre-World War II days. Scientific bodies, supported by public funds and charged with assessing and improving the public's health, ignore completely the results of contemporary methods of marketing food...Failure to monitor and to appreciate the results of rapidly moving technology produces a BRUTAL EFFECT (emphasis mine) that forms the central theme of this book. Technology founded on mechanistic laws clashes head on with the processes of a natural world which adheres to very different laws. Modern industry, ignoring these biologic laws, molds and manipulates natural processes to suit and to promote its own mechanistic and economic goals."

    The madness has been building for many decades. The U.S. Government could further restrict access to firearms. And police officers could be stationed in elementary schools as they are in high schools. But such draconian measures do not address the central question; how to improve the emotional health of the populace where industrial food is king.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)