Poison Pen

Taste the rainbow. It isn't a tuna, its methyl mercury. Stuck in your throat? Wash it down with a little fluoride. Fluoride is necessary for your teeth, friend, like a cheeseburger is necessary for an Okinawan. It is bad for you and it makes you feel stupid good.

Oil and markets have driven the witless industrial poisoning of the last two centuries. I hate it that spinach is as likely as not to be tainted with fertilizer wastes and arsenic. I am aggravated by Teflon stuck in my liver. The marker of this epoch will be a million billion plastic globules littered over every square mile of the planet.

Can't feel good about steak hopped up with antibiotics and steroids. Funny, my doctor doesn't prescribe antibiotics like candy anymore, but does permit breastfeeding. Score one for old wives tales, dock science negative two. Monsanto is going to give us corn that grows kernels upside down, because upside kernels are intellectual property, belonging to Monsanto, and any crow that carries a kernel to an adjacent field and flips it over will be prosecuted. The new economy can be so tricky.

Got asthma? Might be diesel pollution. Got aluminum? Probably, but you don't need it. It isn't a vitamin. Feel heavy? Try leeches, you only need so much lead. Bit dusty down by the old nuclear reactor? Anything, even tissue paper will stop nasty alpha particles before they can damage you. Unless they should get embedded in your soft tissue. Now how would that happen? Breath deep. It is called "Gulf War Syndrome". Or just, "Hanford Breath".

Want to pump waste into the ocean? All your friends doing it.

I could go on. Even buckyballs have betrayed us. Male frogs are growing breasts.

What kind of world will be left when this abuse ends?

(c) Jon S., 2004