I HAVE A DREAM - I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "I Have a Dream" delivered Aug. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.
Photography by Rich Gigli
By Shawn Dell Joyce
Imagine if beings from outer space knocked on your door looking mighty hungry. You would show them the refrigerator, pantry and cupboards, and they would throw up their handlike appendages in dismay and mutter, “All you have to eat is corn?!”
If that sounds far-fetched, go take a peek at the ingredients labels on your packaged foods and drinks. I bet you’ll find corn, in one of its many forms, near the top of most of the ingredients lists. Corn is one of the main ingredients in more than 4,000 products found in American homes, even toothpaste. Some processed foods, such as Twinkies, contain more than 30 forms of corn.
Americans have become the true “corn people,” more so than the Aztecs and the Incas. If you were to examine a typical American skeleton under an electron microscope, you would find corn isotopes throughout our bones. We have more corn isotopes than any other culture, past, present and perhaps future. Aliens from another planet would think that we worship corn, because most of our modern food system revolves around it.
Americans eat about 1 ton of corn per person, per year. This is not the delicious sweet corn our local farms grow. This is commodity corn, appetizingly called No. 2 corn, and is the main crop grown in our country. We primarily eat corn in the form of animal products.
Cows – ruminants, which naturally eat grasses — are being fed corn unnaturally. Salmon never would eat corn in the wild but are fed corn on salmon farms. Chickens and pigs were designed naturally for varied diets but instead are fed mainly corn. In 2006, 6.1 billion bushels of American corn went to factory farms and feedlots to be turned into protein by animals, according to the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.
About 755 million bushels of corn went to make corn sweeteners, such as corn syrup, citric acid, lactic acid, sorbitol, enzymes, starches and thickeners. Thanks to the versatility of corn, our consumption of processed sweeteners has risen 25 pounds per person since we began mass-producing the stuff in the early 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We also are eating almost 20 pounds more corn in the form of meat; 65 pounds more processed grains, such as wheat and corn; and almost 20 pounds more fats and oils per person, per year, according to the USDA.
During this same period, we have seen such food-related illnesses as diabetes, cancers and obesity rise dramatically.
In spite of the surgeon general’s warning of an “epidemic of obesity,” we still are finding new and more fattening ways to consume corn.
Corn is also the most heavily subsidized commodity crop we grow. Under the latest farm bill, mega-corn growers bite off more than a third of farm payments, or about $51.3 billion. It costs Iowa farmers about $2.50 to grow a bushel of corn, yet they can sell the corn for only about $1.45, according to Michael Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Our tax dollars are making up the $1 difference per bushel. This encourages farmers to grow even more corn, which further floods the market and pushes the price even lower. When this heavily subsidized cheap corn is exported to countries like Mexico, it undermines their food security because their small farmers cannot compete.
Corn is also one of the most environmentally devastating crops to grow. Corn guzzles fossil fuels in the forms of fertilizer, insecticides and heavy processing machinery. Each calorie of corn produced requires a calorie of fossil fuels to grow using standard farming practices. When that corn is converted into corn syrup, it requires 10 calories of fossil fuels to create one calorie of syrup. When corn is converted into ethanol, we get about four calories of fuel energy for every three of calories of corn, according to the USDA.
The hidden costs of fertilizer runoff into our rivers, creating “dead zones” in our lakes and oceans, and the devastation to wildlife by growing a single crop on so much land make corn extremely expensive to the environment.
Is there any way out of this maize madness? Well, you could plead with the aliens to take you with them or start demanding that our tax dollars fund saner agriculture policies.
In our country, eating is a political act. Every dollar you spend on food is a vote cast. When you pass up processed foods, with all of their hidden corn, and buy fresh, locally grown foods, you are helping to encourage more sustainable agriculture.
Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com
Photography by Rich Gigli
RAIN - I'm singing in the rain. Just singing in the rain. What a glorious feeling I'm happy again. (Gene Kelly- Singin' In The Rain, lyrics)
By Beth Quinn
I continue to be astonished by imbeciles who think they have something of value to contribute to the national dialogue.
Why, I don’t know. I should be used to them by now. George Bush, the former imbecile-in-chief, gave this crowd a sense of legitimacy and now they won’t shut up. Anyone with a computer and a set of falsehoods upon which to base a wrong-headed opinion can clutter up our e-mail inboxes with LOUD STUPID STUFF.
I’ve recently been informed by e-mail that:
This week, though, I’ve received the lengthiest and most comprehensive bit of lunacy yet. It’s a page-by-page “analysis” of the 1,000-page House health-care reform bill, which proves that Our President can’t wait to get the US of A turned into a Socialist State fast enough, taking away our freedoms in the process, including our freedom to blog and giving free health-care to immigrants!
It’s hard to say who originated this “analysis,” but Fox News is partially responsible for giving birth to most of the nation’s misinformation. After all, when a “news” announcement is followed with a question mark (Will the government determine who will be euthanized and when?), it kind of passes for the truth.
For some reason, these anti-health-care reform folks are suddenly real taken with our current system of health care, which is something most of them used to complain about. Now that the not-born-in-the-good-old-US-of-A-president wants to change it, they want to hang onto it – and with some strange reasoning.
They think this foolish president of ours suddenly wants us to pay for health-care for the poor. (Note to the stupid people: We already do, just not terribly efficiently).
They are suddenly big fans of private health insurance companies, which have our best interest at heart. (Another note to the stupid people: No they don’t, but any fairness you experience is due to government regulation).
And they want the government to stay away from their Medicare. (This is getting tedious, but another note to the stupid people: Medicare IS a government insurance program and it’s actually run very well except for the prescription drug part that Bush messed with to the great advantage of the pharmaceutical companies.)
Happily, a reader named Sandy Holtz, who also received this chain e-mail analysis of the health-care bill, sent me a link to a site called politifact.com. This site, which is run by the St. Petersburg Times, is non-partisan and is intended to sort out fact vs. fiction in Washington. It’s a good site to bookmark because it does responsible things like keep a report card on Obama’s campaign promises.
It also sorts out fact vs. fiction in chain e-mail like the health-care “analysis.” You might find politifact’s analysis of the “analysis” interesting. (Bottom line: Most of it falls into the category of “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”)
In case you missed it, though, the following are some of the “facts” about health-care reform efforts that are being e-mailed around by Americans who are proud of their ignorance:
(On that last point? I’d like to recommend that the government tests IQ before allowing people to breed, too.)
Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com
By Jeffrey Page
In another display of official lunacy, the government (a) decided to conduct a study of telephoning while driving, evidently ignoring the fact that such studies have been going on elsewhere for more than 15 years, (b) discovered that – duh! – it’s not safe to yak on the phone while cruising to work, and, fearful of antagonizing Congress, (c) squelched its own findings.
In other words, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration came through in the clutch six years ago and reached a conclusion that was a surprise to absolutely no one and then pretended it did no such thing.
DWP – driving while phoning – is dangerous?
–You knew it and I knew it because we have, any number of times, observed the idiotic driving of people dialing ahead for a pepperoni pizza or making other very important calls. They veer from lane to lane. Often they seem incapable of comprehending that most uncomplicated expression, NO TURN ON RED. And they go when they should stop and stop when they should go.
–We knew it because there are certain truths in life – even if we can’t explain how we know them. Call it common sense or intuition: We know that if we don’t concentrate on controlling our 4,000-pound vehicles we could be killed. We know this the same way we know not to swim when we see dorsal fins and not to eat wild mushrooms unless we’re in the company of a world class mycologist.
–Oh, and of course let’s not forget that the danger of carrying on a phone conversation while tooling along, say, Route 17, isn’t exactly news.
In fact, the New England Journal of Medicine published a Canadian study showing that a driver talking on a cell phone was as likely to be in a crash as someone who was legally drunk. To state the danger quantitatively, researchers found that using a cell phone in the car quadrupled the chance of a crash.
The Canadians even found that the chances of an accident are not reduced when the driver uses a hands-free phone to order that pizza. It’s not the dialing necessarily, and it’s not the grasping of the phone necessarily that are so dangerous. It’s the very act of talking with someone who isn’t there.
That was published in 1997.
Other studies with nearly identical findings have preceded the outright bans of driving while phoning in Switzerland, Israel, Brazil and several other nations. All were noted in the American press.
If there’s anyone who still refuses to make the connection between driver-phoning and crashes, note The New York Times’s recent report that NHTSA’s 2003 findings – the ones that were nearly lost to the ages – estimated that 955 people were killed in nearly a quarter million phone-related accidents in 2002 alone.
The dangers of driver-phoning are known to all sensible people. What’s breathtaking is that NHTSA, an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation, tried to hide its own report, a report that states the obvious. Congress was dead set against the agency dealing directly with the states on this matter of auto safety, even though auto safety is NHTSA’s mission.
To oppose Congress on this could have jeopardized the agency’s funding.
NHTSA’s finding might have remained locked forever in a file cabinet in Washington except that the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen got hold of it through the Freedom of Information act and turned a copy over to The Times.
Now the information is out there – as if you didn’t know it.
But the question remains: Why would Congress object to NHTSA’s dealing with its counterpart agencies in the 50 states? Forgetting for a moment that studies have continually shown the danger of driver-phoning, wouldn’t it make perfect sense for NHTSA and state transportation departments to remain in contact on such a crucial and widespread problem?
Cynics might wonder if the powerful telecommunications lobby had a role in Congress’ decision to put NHTSA’s findings on ice.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Fields line the dirt road on the entrance to the Bashakill, in Westbrookville. Wild grasses grow tall and golden, and everywhere, flowers are blooming. For price and size information, contact carriebjacobson@gmail.com
Chapter 9
By Carrie Jacobson
The story so far:
Zoe, an elderly, blind lhasa apso, was left at the Pike County Humane Society by her owner, James Dunning, who has lost his job and been forced to move in with his wife’s mother, who is allergic to dogs of all kinds.
Distraught, sad, embarrassed, James left Zoe at the shelter in the middle of the night. Before dawn, she was freed by Kaja, a big red dog who’s been living on her own for a few months. Zoe and Kaja have set out to make their way back to Middletown, to try to find James.
The sun wakes Zoe, and she opens her eyes to find that Kaja is gone. Zoe stands, and stretches. The sun is up, she can tell that much, but the morning is damp and cool, and she curls around herself and goes back to sleep again.
When Kaja nudges her awake, the sun has come up and the day has warmed, and Zoe finds she’s hungry. They walk out of the woods and stand at the edge of the road until there are no cars coming. Then they cross, and Kaja leads Zoe up the road, and then down a driveway and around the back of a little house to a trash can that’s been turned over.
This is a first for Zoe. All of this is a first for her. She’s been a pet, all these years. Even her first family, even though they hit her and kicked her, they gave her dog food – when they remembered.
Now, she’s eaten a rodent that Kaja killed, and now, she’s eating trash.
And it’s not so bad.
They find water in a bucket, then, and drink, then trot through back yards until they come to a small grove of trees and thick grass. They curl up and sleep for a while. When they wake, they walk along the edge of the road, heading away from the afternoon sun.
Zoe can smell the river, and it frightens her. It smells like water, and like mud. It smells like fish, and like the wind, and somehow, it smells like cars, too. And it is noisy. The water sounds fast and strong and deep, and the noise scares Zoe, makes her tremble.
They get closer to the river, and the noise gets louder. And now, Zoe can hear people shouting, and laughing. She can’t see them, can’t see the rafts and canoes they’re riding in, but she can hear them, calling to each other, crying out in glee, and rushing downstream with the current.
Kaja stops then, and sniffs at the wind. She listens, head cocked, one ear up. She looks down the road and up the road, and then she nudges Zoe onto the pavement. She steps in front of Zoe and walks down the roadway.
And then, she steps onto the bridge.
It’s an awful bridge, made of slats of wood so thin and so loose that it seems impossible they could hold a dog, let alone a car. But Kaja has seen it, she’s seen cars go across this bridge. The bridge hasn’t fallen down, the slats haven’t fallen in, the cars haven’t fallen through.
Kaja looks over the edge, and sees the river, far, far below, and she feels her legs shake. The little dog can’t see, Kaja knows this, and she thinks that maybe, for once, that’s a good thing.
She sets a paw on the bridge. The wood feels somehow soft, somehow warm. She pushes the little dog to the middle of the span, and walks beside her. This way, the little dog can’t fall off, and Kaja doesn’t have to look at the river.
They are about halfway across when Kaja feels a thrumming in the pads of her feet. She looks up. There’s a car, inching onto the far edge of the bridge.
She makes Zoe stop, and then she runs at the car, barking as loud as she can, barking and barking, baring her teeth – and the car stops.
The driver sees her, and then sees the little dog beyond her on the bridge, and stops the car.
Kaja trots back to Zoe, nudges her up and along, and they trot up to the front of the car, then go around it and then finally, trot off of the bridge and onto the solid soil of Barryville.
Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com
Shawn’s Painting of the Week for Aug. 2, 2009 is a plein air painting done Thurs. morning of the Shawangunk Ridge from Sandhill Road in Gardiner. Plein air painting classes and artwork offered through the Wallkill River School in Montgomery.
By Michael Kaufman
For Bruce Jenner it was the Olympic decathlon. For Mark Spitz it was the seven gold medals. For Buzz Aldrin it was the Apollo moon landing. And for Rudolph Giuliani it is September 11 that guarantees him a hefty annual income touring the country as a high-priced motivational speaker. I caught his act in the summer of 2004—when he was still being hailed nationally as “America’s Mayor”—and frankly I was disgusted by it.
In the days before his talk Giuliani had been widely quoted condemning the street vendors who sold photos and other merchandise to tourists visiting the area surrounding the Ground Zero site. Apparently he found this lowbrow sort of profiteering shameful and unseemly. But he had no difficulty accepting $75,000 from a pharmaceutical company to deliver a 12-minute scripted talk to a group of medical specialists attending a national meeting in New York. That comes out to $6,250 per minute for a self-serving speech capitalizing on the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.
One might argue that Giuliani earned his right to collect hefty speaking fees because of his exemplary leadership in uniting New Yorkers in the time of crisis after the attack. Well, yes and no. The Rev. Al Sharpton may have stated it a bit indelicately but he was not far off the mark when he said it was not Giuliani but rather the “pain and decency” of New Yorkers that brought us together. “We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor,” said Sharpton.
By the summer of 2004 it was known that Giuliani allowed the heroic rescue workers to continue their futile, round-the-clock efforts long after he was informed there was no chance of rescuing anyone who had not already been saved. It is impossible to know how many severe, long-term illnesses this caused among the firefighters, police, and others, who wore no masks or other protective gear to protect them from the toxic environment.
Giuliani still likes to say he was at the site “as often, if not more, than most workers.” As for the toxicity, he says, “I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.” Well, yes and no. In the first few days he was there a lot. After that, his appointment books show he spent a total of 29 hours at the site over three months. Recovery workers spent that much time over two or three days.
But that is not what disgusted me about the speech I witnessed. It was the whole way it went down. I learned that Giuliani would be speaking from one of the public relations people running the press room at the medical meeting. I wondered why there was no press release about it. She quietly explained that Giuliani had agreed to come only if there would be no publicity. This was puzzling to her. The only media representatives allowed to attend would be from the medical and scientific outlets…and they were not to ask questions. The only questions Giuliani would take would be from audience members. And no reporters from consumer publications or regular news organizations would be admitted. I got in because I worked for a medical publishing company.
Giuliani received a standing ovation after being introduced as “America’s Mayor.” His speech was plain vanilla motivational featuring his six “lessons on leadership” and the people he admires most. (Ronald Reagan tops the people list.) From time to time, however, he departed from the script to make a hostile comment about the media. (“They always look for something negative.”) After several such jibes he stopped and said, “Gee, I hope none of them are here now!” Then he looked around the room, pretending to search for any lurking reporters, knowing full well they had been excluded. From my position, standing against a wall near the front of the room I wanted to ask, “What are you afraid of?”
As the charade continued through a fawning question-and-answer session (“Do you think you might run for president some day?”) I thought of a lot more questions, but I had to keep them to myself. Say what you will about Sarah Palin, at least she has the guts to face the representatives of the media she so despises and try her best to answer their questions. It came as no surprise to me that during the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Giuliani gratefully accepted the endorsement of Pat Robertson, the Christian fundamentalist minister, who said the September 11 attacks happened because “God Almighty is lifting his protection from us” because, among other things, “we have allowed rampant pornography on the Internet.”
Jack Newfield said it best in a 2002 article in the Nation: “Rudy Giuliani was a C-plus Mayor who has become an A-plus myth.”
Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.