I have lost too many friends, family and community acquaintances to the money surrounding cancer. This is honest and heart felt and there is in my view zero room for debate. It is time for action and anyone not understanding ought to look around in your community. Notice the pain and suffering and know that much of it is preventable.

For my friend Lori, my Dad, and others who have had to endure the sickness…and lost.

When I was a kid cancer wasn’t even spoken of except in whispers. Very few got it and no one knew what it was. We did not know whether it was contagious and certainly not what to do about it and frankly we still don’t. We dump the equivalent of drain cleaner into the bodies of folks who have “cancer” and pour untold money in to “a cure” for it, which in my view will I doubt ever be found.

My eldest Brother is lecturing this week at the University of California Riverside (UCR) on the incredible amount of chemicals in our lives and how they effect us. His lecture is by invitation of the Chancellor of UCR where he is in standing as somewhat of an authority on the subject. I wish I could attend as we are like minded on this subject.

Cancers have crept into our lives over the course of 120 years or so and has increased at alarming rates in particular the last 50 years or less. Some argue that population increases are bound to expose more of it, but I beg to differ as the two have no numerical parallels. What has increased in my lifetime are the chemicals in our lives. Now there is a parallel.

When I was young my mother did laundry and we bathed in lye soap made from wood ash, we ate home canned foods much of the time and deer, elk and beef bought from a neighbor. If you talk to most folks in their fifties and sixties today most of them grew up on a farm, their cousins did, or at the very least their grandparents farmed. The crops were fertilized with animal waste; you picked the cotton and turned out the cows in that field to consume the stalks and fertilize as they went along. You gave back to the soil what the plants had extracted, by planting other crops, a practice called crop rotation. Crops were not fed chemical fertilizers and pesticides like they are now becoming addicted to the fertilizers and the microbes are killed off by the bug juice rendering the soil useless causing more use of both chemicals.*

At some point in my growing up we started using powdered laundry soap and store-bought eggs and chicken. TV dinners were the rage and we had to have plastic containers to store food in. The car interior went from cloth and wood to plastic… and well, plastic. We breathed deep of our newfound wealth of even being able to afford a new car without realizing that car might be killing us along with those plastic storage containers. The insurance companies and the furniture makers sought to protect us not from being sold cigarettes, but to protect us when we fell asleep with one on the couch and flame retardants were born. They didn’t stop there, they coated every baby blanket, shirt, drape, carpet with toxin emitting retardants now suspected of killing house cats by way of thyroid diseases.

What have we learned? Seems to me, nothing. We are pouring money into the repairs and doing nothing about the causes. The friggin’ wheels are falling off the car and we keep driving. We are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars treating one cancer patient and filling the pockets of the companies causing those cancers. It is not the farmers, they have been told that everything is fine and of course we believe our product salesmen and corporate led research. It is not the sales person in the clothing or furniture store, it is protection of industry giants through lobby of our politicians. For every dollar they spend on legislation and misleading, they get back a hundred for their investors who are like a hungry giant.

My younger Brother worked for a time at a Goodyear service facility where he was hired as the service manager. He worked with integrity and managed to increase traffic to the point that nearly every bay was full, every day. His supervisor came to him one day and told him he had to up his game. Bewildered my brother finally asked just how he was to do that when all the bays were full? His boss told him to increase revenue by lying to people until they believed they needed new brakes, or a transmission, when all they really needed were wiper blades. He quit.

When are we all going to say enough is enough and quit? How many cancer deaths will it take until we start asking questions? How many before the EPA and USDA scientist are not strangled by special interest telling them to ignore their findings? This has become entirely too routine for American’s, this cycle of bathing in chemicals, desperately trying to comfort the dying and allowing these coverups of the causes. Parkinson for one is proven to be related to farm chemicals. Thyroid health is being correlated with fire retardants.

How many Lori’s, Kathy’s, Steve’s, fathers, mothers and children will it take. We must get off this complacent attitude that someone will “figure it out”. They have, wake up and smell the roses that will not attract bees because they have bred the attractors out of them. When will it be you with the cancer? When will we collectively decide we do not want these companies experimenting on us? 98% of all the chemicals in our lives are never tested…think about that.

*To be fair, some of the farm chemicals used are, in small doses perhaps not immediately toxic, but what we do not consider is we eat a variety of vegetables, meats and fruit so added together your liver can only take so much before the toxins start bypassing it.