January 18 2015
THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS
Is Cancer just a matter of bad luck?
Last week the BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation – had an article, since then taken over by many other media outlets, claiming that Cancer was a matter of bad luck. We all know cancer victims. Last year I met a woman doctor at a shopping mall, conspicuous by having here head covered. We chatted for a while and she, sort of angry, told me that she was suffering from breast cancer and had already gone from some thirty treatments in the university
town, some 90 km away.
Cancer strikes the best of us. For some the reason is obvious: smoking and lung cancer are intimately linked, yet a very good friend of mine, who never smoked, died of lung cancer so did a sister who did smoke, but had gone through a painful separation.
I am not a doctor and have no expert opinion on anything, being more a generalist and a keen observer of humanity. Is cancer really a matter of bad luck? I don’t think so. The incidence of cancer is increasing even as billions are spent on research which has been successful in at least increasing the lifespan of patients, although not always the quality of life.
Why is cancer increasing? It should seem logical that getting older exposes more people to cancer, although my observation is that cancer strikes more the not so old, those in the 50-70 age range. Those who live beyond that age appear to be able to somehow outwit the cancer curse. Of coursed death strikes the older folk- 80 and beyond – too but then it usually is a case of simply being worn out, heart failure and other system malfunction.
No, cancer is not a matter of bad luck. Cancer-giving elements are everywhere: the soil, the water, the air, our food: all are contaminated. There are thousands of chemical compounds out there. Yes, it can hit anybody, but there are ways to prevent them to some extent. Eating organic, avoiding meat and sugar, drinking well water, growing your own food, exercising, marrying the right person and stay married, going to church, all are preventing measures. They don’t eliminate cancer, but they certainly will reduce the incidence.
Increasing dysfunctional society
Today much is going wrong. Take infection. Infection is still a great killer and antibiotics are becoming less effective. World-wide some 13 million people die of infections. The overuse of antibiotics in raising animals, chicken and cattle, are blamed for the loss of effectiveness of penicillin in treating diseases. People who own these animals – I am reluctant to call them farmers – raise chickens and cattle in such crowded conditions that once an illness penetrates there, death is inevitable, so they saturate them with antibiotics, which causes immunity in us. Animal confinement is needed to economize on space and heating: in the final analysis it is all about cheap food which is cheap only in terms of dollars. It is expensive in causing illness and death in humans, it is expensive in terms of environmental degradation, but that is a cost born by society at large, something that exposes an entirely different can of worms.
We all clamor for lower taxes and less medical costs, but both higher taxes and greater medical expense are the inevitable result of our increasingly dysfunctional financial, medical and nutritional system.
Take the US medical system. It seems to me that the USA is leading the world in being ungovernable. The medical establishment has become outrageous. The New York Times cited some examples: A bill of over $40,000 for the 20 minutes it took a doctor to stitch a cut; an ambulance ride of only 200 feet that cost $3,421. The premium to insure people against medical mishap is often the largest expense in the budget of those who live in the US of A. The New York Times article quoted that a healthy, insured couple is slowly going under because their insurance premiums are now twice as high as their mortgage and food costs. This coverage also comes with a high deductible – often thousands of dollars – as well as obligations to share in the medical expense. The medical system there is not about healing but about fattening the wallets of the medical operators, just as the Food industry is not about nutrition but about the financial welfare of the shareholders. The political parties are there not for the voters but to please the billionaires in the USA who finance the system. I hope that the Church is there to please God and not the parishioners. A society based on greed, cannot last.
The USA is the only Western country that has no universal, state-sponsored, medical system. We, in fortunate Canada, have that. Not only is our total cost lower than in the USA but the outcome is much better with lower mortality because everybody is covered. In the USA there are tens of millions who simply cannot afford the high premiums, although, under the new Obamacare plan, there are subsidies available. The crazy Republicans are doing everything to rob the poor of their coverage: and they are the supposedly Christian Party.
Soil and health
Something new has been discovered this past week, or rather came to light in the recent past concerning soil, that basic matter we use to grow stuff on. The discovery is that it has the ability to cure infections, especially important because the common ant-infection drug, penicillin, is losing its potency. That soil has magic powers comes to me as no surprise. Genesis, the first book in the Bible, makes it perfectly clear that we, the earth, and our bodies belong together because God formed us out of the earth, shaped us in our present form, male and female (vive la difference), and then infused us with his spirit. We are a piece of the earth and our bonds with the earth belong to our essential being. We are our bodies, are ourselves, and are now and always will be earthly beings.
This significance cannot be exaggerated. Those who renounce the body renounce the connection before God the creator. Both Johan Herman Bavinck – read his book Between the Beginning and the End – and Dietrich Bonhoeffer argue that “The essential point of human existence is its bond with mother earth.” Escape from the body is escape from being human and escape from the spirit as well. The Bible says that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Bonhoeffer also writes in Creation and Fall that we are in the image of God because of our bodiliness. Colossians 1: 15-20 suggests that Jesus was the first human being and as such, as the first human, created everything. When we dis-own the earth relationship – as most Christians do, including Prime Minister Harper of Canada by claiming heaven as life’s goal – then we feel no longer a rapport with the rest of the natural world or even ourselves. Then our bodies can no longer be sources of deep knowledge about the world and we cease to have love, respect and compassion for the earth and our fellow creatures. Thus the discovery that the soil can be a source of healing, can be the source to protect us from the ravages of infections, is really nothing new.
The Covenant
It reminds me of the Covenant. In 1 Samuel 18: 3 Jonathan and David made a blood covenant. They exchanged weapons, clothes, pledged that whatever was theirs would now be held together, and to seal this ultimate promise, made an incision in their arms, let each other’s blood mingle and rubbed in earth. Incidentally God did the same with us in Jesus Christ, the Head of the New Covenant. Soil is the all-important healing agent, and finally scientists have discovered this medium, perhaps too late, because much of the soil of the earth is so polluted that it has become in itself a source of infection.
But there is some pure soil left and most likely in your back or front yard. There’s where we all must go and plant, as much as possible, the food stuff we consume.
That is important for a number of reasons. We all know that we are headed for a disastrous change in the climate. We are not responsible for what others do, but we are accountable for what we do. I believe that, when we appear before the judgment throne of Jesus, one of the questions he will ask us is: what have you done to limit your carbon foot print. It’s no use to say that you have no clue what that means, because ignorance is no excuse. The Carbon Foot Print involves everything we do nowadays. We simply cannot avoid it, but we can limit it to some extent. Eat locally, or eat from within a radius of say 100 km. The best, of course, and the healthiest is to grow your own and eat from your own soil. I cultivate a large vegetable garden, spread out over our septic bed. There’s nothing unhealthy about this. A few decades ago a Prime Minister of India drank every day a glass of his own urine. Soil is enriched by our effluence, reason why farmers use manure to enrich the soil. “We are soil, earth, dust, and to dust, earth, soil we shall return” says the Bible.
Flowering in January in Great Britain
Last year 2014, was the warmest on record. This means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have taken place since the turn of the century. Other records are falling every year: Western Japan saw the heaviest August rains since records began. Parts of the Western US endured persistent drought as did parts of China and Central and South America.
Climate change creates ‘The Weirding of the Weather.’ In Great Britain, thanks to the above average warm weather, flowers, trees, any living plant matter is in an early bloom, posing great dangers due to their premature flowering. A few years ago we in Ontario, had an unusual warm February, causing my apple trees, and actually all apple and cherry trees to bud early. A later frost killed these early buds: no apples and cherries that year in Ontario. The same threatens for Great Britain this year.
So what can we expect?
The following is an excerpt from the Archdruid Report written by John Michael Greer.
“Those of my readers who still have a steady income and a home they expect to be able to keep would still be well advised to double check their insulation and weather stripping, solar water heating and other home scale renewable energy technologies, and turn the back lawn into a vegetable garden with room for a chicken coop, if by any chance they haven’t taken these sensible steps already. A great many of my readers don’t have such options, and at this point, it may be a long time before such options are readily available . This is crunch time, folks; unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re on the brink of a historical inflection point like the ones in 1789 and 1914, one of the watersheds of time after which nothing will ever be the same again.
“There’s still much that can be done in other spheres, and I’ll be discussing some of those things in upcoming posts. In terms of energy and the economy, though, I suspect that for a lot of us, the preparations we’re going to be able to make are the ones we’ve already made, and a great many people whose plans depend on having a stable income and its associated perks and privileges may find themselves scrambling for when the unraveling of the economy leaves them without Those of my readers who have been putting off the big changes that might make them more secure in hard times may be facing the hard decision of making those changes now, in a hurry, or facing the crisis of our age in the location and situation they’re in right now. Those who’ve gone ahead and made the changes—well, you know as well as I do that it’s time to review your plans, double check the details, batten down the hatches and get ready to weather the storm.”
That storm is well in the way. The people in the weather office are pretty good in predicting stormy weather. For stormy weather in the economy we must rely on our guts. My guts signal an economic hurricane coming.
Stay tuned.