Now Age Minute - 12.10.09
Looking for Terror in All the Wrong Places
In a bit of Deja Vu, the Obama Administration is playing the Bush-Cheney-Osama fear card in its plan to extend the already longest war America has ever fought. According to a story from AP/Yahoo News:
"Osama bin Laden may be slipping back and forth from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Or the U.S. might not have a clue, more than eight years after the al-Qaida leader masterminded the terrorist attacks on America.
Given a chance Sunday to clear away some of the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the world's most wanted terrorist, Obama administration officials seemed to add to it with what appeared to be conflicting assessments.
President Barack Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, said bin Laden, believed hiding mainly in a rugged area of western Pakistan, may be periodically slipping back into Afghanistan. But Obama's Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, said the U.S. has lacked good intelligence on bin Laden for a long time — "I think it has been years" — and did not confirm that he'd slipped into Afghanistan."
I'm blessed with a wonderful teenage daughter, who recently entered high school in September. Like most girls her age, she's become intimate with an array of cosmetic products. On any given morning, my bathroom sink is filled with a variety of little plastic items that house mascara, eye liner, lipstick, and so on. Standard fare, I would guess, for most teenage girls. As her dad, you would think that my greatest fear of such beautifying is that it would serve as a shout out to hormone-driven, pubescent boys. But, according to a recent article from TheMedGuru.com, that fear has some competition,
"A new report states beauty concious women end up exposing themselves to highly touted magical potions in cosmetics that claim to make our exterior glow, which are home to potentially dangerous chemicals in reality.
According to researchers, modern cosmetics contain a host of dangerous ingredients that could cause skin allergies to more serious problems like hormonal disturbances, cancer [abnormal cells that divide without control, which can invade nearby tissues or spread through the bloodstream and lymphatic system to other parts of the body. ] or reproductive damage over years of sustained use.
A survey by deodorant-maker Bionsen found that the daily regime of the beauty conscious women is virtually a toxic nightmare, where she ends up slapping 515 different chemicals on her body and face."
My fear increased when I read a column by Nicholas Kristof this past weekend, in the NY Times,
"The battle over health care focuses on access to insurance, or tempests like the one that erupted over new mammogram guidelines.
But what about broader public health challenges? What if breast cancer in the United States has less to do with insurance or mammograms and more to do with contaminants in our water or air -- or in certain plastic containers in our kitchens? What if the surge in asthma and childhood leukemia reflect, in part, the poisons we impose upon ourselves?
This last week I attended a fascinating symposium at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, exploring whether certain common chemicals are linked to breast cancer and other ailments."
Beyond learning that between 1975 and today, breast cancer risk for a fifty year-old white woman increased from 1% to 12%, Kristof reported the following,
"A number of studies, mostly in animals, have linked early puberty to exposure to pesticides, P.C.B.’s and other chemicals. One class of chemicals that creates concern — although the evidence is not definitive — is endocrine disruptors, which are often similar to estrogen and may fool the body into setting off hormonal changes. This used to be a fringe theory, but it is now being treated with great seriousness by the Endocrine Society, the professional association of hormone specialists in the United States.
These endocrine disruptors are found in everything from certain plastics to various cosmetics. “There’s a ton of stuff around that has estrogenic material in it,” Dr. Goldfarb said. “There’s makeup that you rub into your skin for a youthful appearance that is really estrogen.”
And, when I read a story titled, "Millions in U.S. Drink Dirty Water, Records Show", this week in the NY Times, I became totally terrorized. According to the article,
"More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.
That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.
Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards."
Arsenic? Radioactive substances? Dangerous bacteria? In our WATER?
For most of my adult life, I've kept myself reasonably informed about what I consume and expose myself to when it comes to standards of quality, health, and safety. When it comes to my daughter's consumption of beauty aids, however, I'm in much less control. I'm little match for the magicians of Madison Avenue, and the spell they cast over teenage girls all over America, brainwashing them into believing that Maybelline and Cover Girl products hold the key to the possibility of marrying Derek Jeter (what I think is motivating my daughter, anyway). That these items designed to enhance a woman's beauty comes in a carcinogenic cocktail should bring terror to any parent. That we find the same in plastic food containers, and in our drinking water, is equally terrorizing. While I can take steps to protect myself from these dangers, I'm wondering where the consumer protections are? Apparently, they went the same way as the regulations on the big bankers. Unfortunately, human beings, as a group, have not evolved to the point that we can be trusted just to do the right thing, short of rules and consequences for violations of those rules. Unfortunately, those rules and consequences are served for the most part on small-time violators.
This morning, President Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, the absurdity of which was not lost on him, as he underscored in his acceptance speech. That he's choosing to "finish the job" in Afghanistan is not absurd, however. It's downright insane. Personally, I'm less afraid of Tali-Boogie Men than I am of greed-driven, American industrialists. They see the effects of their cancer-causing products as just another profit center, and call it "health care".
- Craig Gordon
