Dec 21

Written by:
12/21/2009 12:34 PM 

Let’s marvel at industry’s attention to breast cancer and menopause only where profitable. Let’s marvel at the back of hand misogyny of a Congress whose palm is out for the healthcare industry to salve. And let’s marvel at the spectacle of senator Ben Nelson making sure women cannot get care for a basic female need. Let’s recoil from all that callous hypocrisy to honor what women do in addition to supplying half the brains on this planet. I hardly know where to begin, so might as well start with the two mammaries, those wonderful hug bumpers. Industry has interfered with their primary purpose by sly promotion of bottle feeding here and by criminal promotion of bottle feeding in the third world. Industry has hijacked their secondary function of attraction to create an unhealthy fixation on fake standards of beauty. All of this contributes to the noted travesties. Anyway in regard to mammaries I am reminded of a story about cows my wife told her grandaughter the other day.

My wife grew up on a dairy farm in Oppdal, Norway where each summer cows were sent to a pasture 1000 meters above the valley. What bottom land existed was needed in the summer to grow hay. The high pasture produced a fine deep yellow butter. To this day the name of that pasture appears on dairy labels even though the last cows were sent up in the seventies. The cows were milked by girls, one reason perhaps was a six to one plurality of girls in that family. One cow is remembered above the rest, Lucky, for over eight years the bell cow. When the time came that comes to all dairy cows, my wife’s mother went to get Lucky. My wife, now seventy-seven, started to describe Lucky’s expression as my wife’s mother approached but could not finish for the tears. Now why should that come to mind. I think it was the size of the gulf separating the cruelty of the US Senate from the humanity of the bond between cow and woman.

Mitigation of the unpleasant effects of menopause has been highjacked to sell needlessly harmful hormone replacements.

If prevention of breast cancer had received one percent of the cost for chemo and surgery then breast cancer today would be just a bad memory. What an if. The pandemic of breast cancer is the result of chemical contamination of food and enviroment plus the ministrations of poverty, in other words, the total hijacking for profit of the stuff of life. Breast cancer is the canary in the cage of our capitalist society.

Congress has persisted in allowing industry to hijack women’s most basic health concerns for the sake of profit. Yet Congress brushes off the impotent rage of the populace with grand speech and forked tongue,