In a rare moment of self-reflective contemplation, one of the leftiest blogs on the left, The Daily Kos, admitted that Olmsted had a point.
In reading all this, I have to face that conservatives just have another version of the same problem. We are often so enamored with the idea that business and industry can solve the problems of humanity, and that free man can, with his clever mind and by the sweat of his brow, build the bright, shining city on a hill, that we fail to see the unintended consequences of these ambitions.
Our freedom to work and to own and to engage in commerce, coupled with our dedication to creation, has done some truly astonishing things. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in less than two centuries. What other culture in the history of man has made such advances?
Progress and innovation have lifted us out of the muck and put us in climate controlled skyscrapers, where we can have pizza delivered while we watch football, and where we don’t have to hunt through the forest and toil in the garden. Which is great. Except that we were kind of made to hunt through the forest and toil in the garden. And when we get too far away from the garden, there are consequences to our health.
When “PROGRESS” and “INDUSTRY” (insert 1950’s post war pro-business, “Better Living Through Chemistry” educational film here) push us to create thousands of compounds and molecules that have never existed on this planet before, and we manufacture them in massive quantities and spread them everywhere, to interact with one another everywhere, in the air, in the water, in homes, in clothes, in foods and in medicines, what we WILL end up with is a chemical soup that WILL harm some or all people. (Any one who does not believe that this is an eventuality is just in denial or has never read Frankenstien or any of the other thousands of cautionary tales of how man’s creations return to bite him in places to which only God and the TSA have unrestricted access.) Because THAT chemical world is not OUR chemical world, the one that nurtured the human race to the place where it could begin an industrial revolution only a very short time ago.
We belong in our garden.
There are basically two camps on how we came to be here in our garden. One is that an omnipotent and loving being made us and placed us in a garden that was created especially for us and would meet our physical needs. The other is that we evolved from the garden and are actually part and parcel of it… just another flower in the garden.
In either case, we belong in our garden. But the burning desire for Free Man to claim his manifest destiny and to build the industrial utopian shining city on a hill has become such a siren song, that we have lost sight of the blessings of the garden and begun to trample it.
And as that happens, it is the vulnerable, the tiniest ones, who still need desperately to be nurtured by that same original clean, rich garden, those little ones whom conservatives really do love and strive to protect from the moment of conception… those are the ones who get hurt first. Our sweet little canaries.
We conservatives too easily forget that just because we can exercise our power and creativity and industry to build ambitious things, does not mean we always should do so. And taking a hard look at the massive damage that unwise industrial “progress” has done to the vulnerable, to those who should have also been Free Men fulfilling their destiny when their time came, but instead will, like my son, be life long dependents, or like Elias Tembenis, never live long enough to fulfill their promise at all… well it is painful and difficult for those on the right. Because guilt is painful and it is also expensive. It means learning difficult lessons and it means that progress will have to slow down in many cases and in some cases stop completely.
And the right can be a powerhouse that does not ever want to stop.
All this is frustrating for me, because autism is something that the right really should get. Because the right is supposed to be about the rights of the individual. It is supposed to be about protecting the little guy from being pushed around by the government. It is supposed to be about individual responsibility. It is supposed to be about law and order. And if you know anything about autism, you know that if we were living in a society where the rights of the individual were being protected, the government was restrained, individual responsibility was being practiced and industrial corruption was kept in check by law and order, you would have to conclude that there would be no autism epidemic, because as soon as the first child was poisoned, the problem would be addressed at every level.
Conservatives get the Laffer curve. So why don't they get that there is a vaccine laffer curve that has a peak vaccine administration rate, and when you go beyond that, health returns start to diminish? We get that making the tax rate 100% will ironically bring in 0 dollars in taxes. How many vaccines does it take to make all our children sick and dead? Does anyone notice that we seemed to have hit the top of the bell curve in the 1970s?
Our autism community has discovered that ultimate solutions don't come from the top down, but the bottom up. Isn’t that what the Tea Party is about? For pete’s sake, the Tea Party should be all about autism. So why don’t they “get” autism?
Blogs on the right like The Daily Caller, Reason and Andrew Breitbart's "Bigs" blast the waste and abuses of government and the Obama administration with both barrels, but seem blind to fraud, coersion and profiteering going on by Sebelius' HHS in the vaccine program. Even in the wake of billions of dollars wasted on a fake pandemic (that we knew was not going to be a threat as it was not a threat to the southern hemisphere during their winter - our summer - of 2009) to make and push the H1N1 vaccine on the American people. Nor did they decry the additional millions of dollars spent to get rid of the nearly one hundred million of doses that had to be disposed of as hazardous materials (because mercury containing vaccines have so much mercury that they are hazmat), because three quarters of the public didn't take the vaccine because even they knew the "pandemic" was a sham to begin with.
Big Hollywood so doesn't get autism, that they actually published a piece, trashing liberal Jenny McCarthy, for probably her only conservative view point, that the government should not force vaccines on people or lie about vaccine safety in order to maniuplate the public into doing something that might harm them for the governments subjective and self-serving idea of "the greater good". Instead of applauding McCarthy for challenging the abuses by her own side of the political spectrum, Big Hollywood belittes her fight against HHS thus giving cover to Sebelius and the Obama administration for their egregious behavior in autism, in an substance-less, ad hominem, "nuts and sluts" attack.
The only way that this could ever get published on a blog that is such a vociferous critic of over reaching and corrupt government is because the editors just do not get autism.
True constitutional conservatives should be at the forefront of autism and should completely get autism, but people claiming to be conservative represent at least half the country and yet still the epidemic rages on.
Which leads me to the overall problem of why neither side, American’s left or right, get autism.
As Liberals and Conservatives we are too enamored with our selves, our big ideas and what we can do, and we do not prize wisdom and caution and the long, long view.
We see the other side's flaws and short sightedness and corruption and disasters with crystal clarity, and we are blind to our own.
The public doesn’t understand that the vaccine program represents the WORST of both worlds. It is the pairing of tyrannical government that decides the most intimate thing in your life, what goes into your body, because it has decided what is best for you, and the cold machine of industry that cannot see lives but only sees profit, BOTH unrestrained because the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 has freed them from the system of checks and balances that our brilliant founders put in place to restrain both the evil intentions and the good hearted unintended consequences of government and industry.
The government/pharma vaccine program treats children (and adults) as if they are functionaries of a system, not individuals of value to be served by the system.
Because the individual members of the public have been reduced to the position of mere functionaires in The Program that has arisen from this ‘public-private partnership’, government and industry can literally lie, cheat, steal, maim and kill, and there are no consequences to either government or industry. The deep pockets of the pharmaceutical industry buy the airwaves and the message and the doctors and the institutions and the government itself, while the government insures that free market principles cannot work and people cannot vote with their feet and leave the vaccine program. And now thanks to ObamaCare, the federal government will fund the vaccine program, so the industry can continue to buy the airwaves and the message and the doctors and the institutions and the government itself... as the pre Vaccine Injury Act, 24 dose childhood vaccine schedule continues to mutate into a bigger and bigger monster as vaccine dose number 70 was just added this month. (Will we hit 100 by 2020?)
And round and round we go, as the canaries fall one by one, and then two by two, as their biological individuality is denied and they are given the same dose of the same shots layered on top of exposures to pesticides and dental amalgam and antibiotics and GMO's and food additives and the thousands of chemicals that live in their bodies and that their great grand parents never came into contact with.
And the public doesn’t understand that those causing the problems in government and those causing the problems in private industry are really just the same unethical bunch of people serving their own grandiose ideas and careers and egos. Julie Gerberding, the government queen of the autism epidemic, is both the head of the CDC AND the head of Vaccines for Merck. Paul Offit, the worlds chief figure head Pharma Rep, is both Merck AND CDC. They fully belong to both tribes.
And the individuals who do this horrible business are given cover when they lie and obfuscate and push for universal mandatory vaccination, damn the consequences, because each side sees them as on “their side” (government public health or industry) and fails to see that the fox is guarding the hen house and making a KILLING on egg sales.
It is time for the public to walk away from these blind and/or corrupt ‘leaders’ and embrace the garden again. We have strayed too far from it and most of us know that.
But what prevents many from doing it is one of the most basic instincts of humanity, the fear of death. We have been tricked into believing that without unrestrained government and industry to save us, we will die. We have been tricked into believing that “government science” and “industrial science” is science itself, and that scientific observation is something the masses cannot practice for themselves without these institutions (much like religion centuries ago).
Through every medium government and industry cry out to the public, “You Need Us… You Need More Of Us!” And we are seduced and frightened into believing them.
There is a wise saying, “When we make decisions based in fear, rather than wisdom, we often end up bringing about the very thing we were afraid of in the first place”.
It is time for progressives to realize that the idea of the utopia ushered in by the government has never worked and will never work, and it is time for conservatives to realize that any utopia brought to you by industry is fleeting and will ultimately become poisonous ruins.
The interesting phenomenon that shows itself in the autism community is that those families and individuals so were so blindly entrenched in either of these systems and who became injured from them, become healed as they move away from them and start using their own work and reasoning, and turning to independent thinkers, to treat “autism”. (Or asthma or allergies or diabetes or cancers or insert modern neuro-immune chronic disease epidemic here.) There is a freedom in coming to grips with the shortcomings of ‘your side’.
It is time for the public to face facts that ambitious progress by either the blind right or blind left has just as great a chance of destruction as it does of salvation. And it is time to work on moving back toward the garden one person, one precious life, one unique individual, one loving family, at a time.
And people are starting to figure that out… so the vaccine program looses adherents to the schedule, and the political parties loose partiers to independent movements, and the medical industry looses customers to natural and alternative medicine.
We are neither cogs in the government program nor grist for the industrial mill.
