Whenever I am in a bad mood, I suspect that I am getting sick and I take some
vitamin C. It has been a long time since I was so sick that I couldn't really get anything done. My wife bought a bottle of 500 1000mg vitamin C
pills, and that's
too much for me so I break them in half. However, there are two events that must be considered in any analysis of my recent avoidance of the
common cold and the
flu. My family has been using an
ionizing air filter for a few years. This filter also produces
ozone, supposedly to mimic the ozone production accomplished outdoors by sunlight since, as the company points out, microbes don't survive very well in ozone. Sometimes one of the kids (little kids) turns the filter off. Since it's very quiet, no one notices that it's off, but I check it whenever one of us is sick and it is often off. Since I don't remember
checking it often when we're all healthy, that's not much to go on, but the entire history of illness in my family over the last couple years does
suggest that ionization, ozone, or both contribute to our health. Note that ozone has negative effects on people too. Our commencement of air filter usage is one of the events that's important. The other one is the flu shot I got about two and a half years ago through my work. I don't know how long those last, but I do know some perhaps useful stuff about the
immune system.
Children in daycare settings get exposed to the
germs of others a lot more than other children. They therefore often have runny noses. However, as
Nietszche pointed out, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In the immune system, exposure to a germ, whether it is lame (actually, physically handicapped through the actions of
pharmaceutical companies) or healthy, will cause the production of
native cells which are specifically designed to recognize and destroy that germ. That's why you can recover after getting sick without taking any medicine.
There is a story of a scientist who gave himself an ear mite infection, recovered, and then did it again, twice. Each time he recovered, he recovered much faster than the previous time. It is remarkable to me how unwilling most people are to undergo suffering to establish such truths.
I wonder if we used a scale from one to ten, one being "'
Iraq?' Who's that, a new Rock band?" and ten being "I know how the Iraqi people will form into groups in conflict if and when Saddam Hussein stops governing the country and I can predict the outcomes of those conflicts and I understand the reasons they will emerge." If people were asked to give themselves a rating on that scale before they answered the question "Should the US be invading Iraq without
UN support?" What would the results look like?
I can imagine that Saddam is in the position of an abusive father (his family being the Iraqi people), being warned and now captured by some
neighborhood do-gooders. Perhaps he feels that the only way to keep his family safe is through this
abuse (his form of
discipline), and he cannot morally choose to stop the abuse because in his heart be believes that it would be irresponsible. Perhaps. Or perhaps he is an evil man with no morals.
I like this line of thought, because along it, we come to the tough issue of foster-parenting and the state-run system of handling kids from abusive families who, our laws have determined, must be taken from those families. Many would argue that breaking up the family is not a good solution. But some judges or social services agents might decide that "it's best for the kids." Once those kids go through the state system and then "age out," an alarming portion of them end up homeless. Do you see the analogy with our NO NOT OUR - the Bush administration's decision on Iraq?
I believe that evil and sin can be the result of only one thing, and that is the choice to
ignore. I suspect that deep in the minds of the people through whom this war came about,
money and
oil and
security have somehow contrived to make them
ignore a simple truth that becomes more obvious as a person grows wiser and more intelligent. That truth is that
violence generally begets violence and that patient, persistent non-violence generally mitigates violence.