0 Because Daylight Saving Time

A day an hour shorter makes for a longer week... 

"...[T]he shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) results in a dramatic increase in cyberloafing behavior at the national level."

DT Wagner et al, J Appl Psychol. 2012 Sep;97(5):1068-76

A quarter of the world's population will be groggy tomorrow. A few people will die traumatically. Students' test skills will deteriorate. A few more people will die of heart attacks. The stock market may crash.

And yet we still do it.

Stonehenge time

You cannot save time.

You cannot add an hour of sunshine to your day.

You can, though, manipulate human conceits. If nothing else, Daylight Savings Time is an excellent way to demonstrate to children the folly and the real consequences of humans believing they control more than they control.

***

Tomorrow my 1st period lambs will trudge through before dawn through blackened banks of snow to get to school. Broad Street in Bloomfield will look like the zombie apocalypse. We'll tell them to keep their heads up (or at least wipe the drool of their desks before they leave), but we are bucking millions of years of evolution.

Photo by Eugene Ter-Avakyan, cc-2.0

Humans need sleep. Adolescents (still considered by most to be a subset of humans) need more than the 97 minutes my kids average on Sunday nights.

And why not? What better way to prep for college and career readiness in the global economy than making students take life-altering assessments while comatose? Have kids knock down a few Xanax pills, and chase it with gin and Adderall cocktails to make it really authentic.

Arne says: "Students exist To Serve Man"

"About 1 in every 6 high school seniors in the United States has ever had some exposure to prescription stimulants, either medically or nonmedically."

Stonehenge photo by Resk, released to PD
Yep, a repeat--I ilke cycles....

Detail: Because Daylight Saving Time

0 CCSS: Creative, Competent, Social Students

I teach biology, but teach little about living.

You do not need to know anything about mitosis to know how to live.
You do not need to know anything about how to live to learn mitosis.

Too many of us strive to do whatever it is we must do without a thought to why we do anything the way we do it.

It's not learning that matters, it's living. Learning is an evolutionary tool shared by a lot of species better at this living thing than the current version of H. sapiens. Animals who choose to ignore the world around them do not last very long. Humans are no exception.

We have fetishized education as some sort of independent structure, institutionalizing what we think matters without thinking about what actually does matter. Why else care who graduated from where, or class ranks, or SAT scores?

Why do we let a few strangers dictate a "common core" defining what should be learned?

Here's my CCSS--we need to foster competent, creative, and social students. It's not my place (or anyone else's) to dictate a child's life path, but if we must have common standards, here are a few I think are worth sharing:

Students should know what's edible in their area, and how to prepare it. Around here it could be wild cherries, dandelions, squirrel, deer, clams, or hundreds of other fine food sources. Not saying they need to forage like Wildman Steve Brill, but using primary sources for food ought to be at least as important as using primary sources for some term paper no one will read besides a teacher.

Students should know the basics of their dwellings, and be able to use truly digital tools like hammers, screwdrivers, and saws to make and repair the things we need within our dwellings. Knowing how to approach a simple plumbing problem (or any mechanical problem) matters more than knowing how to "apply the Binomial Theorem."

Students should know what they need to stay alive, what goes into them (and where it came from) and what goes out of them (and where it goes). If they don't know this, they literally don't know shit. 

Arne and his pals would like your children to Serve Man....

Our economy depends on sustaining learned helplessness; our current way of schooling does just that.

Our children need to learn to read, to write, to develop reasonable number sense, and to solve problems. They need a reasonable sense of what's real (and what's not), and a reasonable chance to live a happy and productive life.

They also need to live as the animals that they are.

Detail: CCSS: Creative, Competent, Social Students

0 The PARCC and the Pope

"When he listens to his conscience,
the prudent man can hear God speaking."

Catechism of the Catholic Church, "The Judgment of Conscience," Article 6, Section I

I'm a fallen-by-the-wayside Catholic with misgivings. I miss Confession and Communion, and there's still the hint of fear of eternal damnation--one does not easily escape the clutches of Sister Barbara Mary, even almost a half century later. Heck, I studied Latin.

If folks ask me now about Catholicism, I get a hazy warmth recalling its better aspects--it encourages fearless activism for social justice, it is a deep part of my Irish-American culture, and walking out into the sunshine after confession lit up my limbus.

But then there's the power thing--too few folks dictating deciding what's right for too many people. "The Judgment of Conscience" matters, of course, and for me it would be the heart of The Church, should I return, but in day-to-day living, culture trumps conscience. We hide in our unconsciousness.

***

A student asked me what I thought about the PARCC exams this week--our schedule has been bent out of shape, and will be for 5 more weeks later this year, and the kids are getting hammered taking an officious test that may (or may not) count.

The question is a loaded one, of course, especially for one charged with carrying out the will of the state--I am, after all, a government agent. Still, I promised my lambs I would not lie to them in a world where most adults do just that, so I answered.

The gist of the "new" standards, when viewed from a step or two back, are not awful--we want children to be able to figure things out through analysis of available evidence using the tools of language, logic, and mathematics. We all want that (so long as it, um, complements our magical views of capitalism). Who sitting in the pews could have a problem with article 1777?

But the The Church steps in with a few (mostly) white, (mostly) male, (mostly) pale power players, and Article 6 gets treated like a mouse nibbling on the Host in the Tabernacle.

Look at the folks who run Achieve, the National Governor's Association, the original players who wrote NGSS, and the money men at Pearson pushing the product. They'd fit right in at the Vatican.

Pope Glen Moreno, Chairman of Pearson

Oh, I'm sure there are a lot of good people with good intentions (with concomitant good salaries) doing what they believe is in the interest of the economy children, but while I'll buy their faith, I'm going to look hard before dropping a nickel on the collection basket.

"It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience.
This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection:
Return to your conscience, question it. . . . Turn inward, brethren, and in everything you do, see God as your witness."
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1779

Detail: The PARCC and the Pope

0 What are you living for?

Every living critter under and over you, in and around you, has a lineage just as long as yours, stringing back billions of years, with the same basic daily goals and needs as you.

Except most of us in our culture have forgotten what those goals are. We've also forgotten (or spend our hours trying to forget) our mortality.

When was the last time kids in your classroom discussed "what are you living for" with a reasonably rational adult?

Lazy ass jelly fish lolling in the Delaware Bay at dusk.

Animals (besides humans) never plan for the future beyond taking care of the business that needs to be taken care of in order to live. Beyond that, most animals fiddle away the day socializing, eating, snoozing, or just watching the shadows move as the sun glides by, the antitheses of the good capitalists and consumers humans cherish in these parts.

Time for Achieve to start cracking down on all those lazy ass squirrels!
Common Core Squirrel Standards, anyone?

Detail: What are you living for?

0 Whose stories are we teaching?

For part of  chilly February afternoon, a chunk of the frozen bay perilously perched itself by the edge of the sea.

It held my attention, this lifeless form, a half ton of water balancing on a small pedestal.

Our minds create stories upon stories, stories that help us survive, help us live, but stories are just that, and the intensity of my interest at this random block of broken berg makes little sense.

Rationally, I know that this is just chunks of ice from the fresh Delaware River above, coalescing from the forces of the tides, but it became my altar of unhewn stone, an evanescent idol.

Delaware Bay, North Cape May, February 22, 2015

We worship patterns, and see gods where none exist, but our stories have been, until now, based on the larger world around us.

We let others manipulate us and our children, replacing our stories of nature with the stories of the abstract, of global economies, of currencies, of hubris. We encourage our children to play with the screens that distort and manipulate our view of the world.

And then we wonder what's wrong with them.....

Detail: Whose stories are we teaching?

0 Daphnia dance while the children cry

The anger, the sadness, the tears of students are real.
It's been a long February, but it's more than that.

I spent some time yesterday gazing at a colony of daphnia dancing among the elodea in the last hour of sunlight angling through the glass world they live in. Bubbles of oxygen streamed up from the plants, bubbles made up of broken water molecules, slashed by the sun's energy, now used by the same daphnia as they go about doing whatever daphnia do.

Paul Hebert at the Public Library of Science, via wikimedia (CC)

Eat, rest, move, have sex, make more daphnia, and sometimes (so it seems) doing nothing at all.

I don't do much for the daphnia--just add a little bit of water to the container now and again. I do not know where they came from, and if I were not a modern sort, they'd be enough evidence to persuade me that spontaneous generation is real.

Been an interesting couple of months, reminders of my mortality marked by a heart that beats to its own drummer, and I am no longer so blasé about the tears of the young ones in front of me. I am part of a system that is breaking the kids.

I put no pressure on my daphnia, who dance the day away. They already know how to live.

I put too much pressure on my lambs, who no longer see the daphnia, and would find it strange to see an older man spend so much time staring at a watery world on  a windowsill.

Too few of us know what matters, yet we insist on dictating to young humans just that.

Detail: Daphnia dance while the children cry

0 The connected child

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 

Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

Our lives cost the lives of others. That's always been true, and will be so long as we breathe. Technology allows us to forget this.

As technophiles spew on about a global community, where your value is measured by the number of hits your words register, their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them.

You want every child "connected"? So do I. It's what's at the other end of the connection that matters.

All children, every child, should know where the stuff that makes up their bodies comes from, all the way back to the living organisms that fill up, unrecognizable, wrapped in plastic.

All children, every child, should know where their waste goes, through hidden pipes and trucks that rumble before dawn through the neighborhood once or twice a week.

We can do both, I suppose--just make sure you cover up the machines when I bring in a calf (or whatever the cafeteria is serving this week) to slaughter in the classroom.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.

Detail: The connected child

0 Bringing our kids back to the Stone Age

This is my honing stone. 

Before that it was my Mom's. 

Before that it was Grannie's, my Mom's mom.

It has worked, and worked well, for over 50 years, and I expect that it has another half-century left in it.
Behind it is my favorite knife. It is a wedge and a lever, two simple machines. Knives work by separating and ripping through molecules.

I like sharpening my knife. It is an Old World skill. I like the heft of the knife, the sound of steel on stone, the memories of my genetic past that held this same stone.

The honing stone bends the edge of the knife back its ideal position, but at an imperceptible cost.

Over the years, the stone erodes, and each millimeter or two of depression represents years of our lives.

While we spin tales of modern life, urging ourselves to greater heights, rushing through our days, the basics remain (as they ever will) the same.

We eat, we breathe, we grow, we love, we die. The stone connects me to the knife which connects me to the food I will eat. The gap in the stone connects me to my Mom and to her Mom, and will, someday, connect my child to me.

Knives and honing stones are technological wonders. We forget the wonders of steel because so few of us recognize its raw materials, few of us are aware of the tremendous amount of energy needed to create the blade we take for granted. We marvel at high tech machines, yet not one in a thousand of us could make a good steel knife.

If a child cannot sharpen a knife, cannot prepare his own food, cannot imagine the animal slaughtered before it ends up on his table nor the kernel of corn that grew into his corn chips, we are not doing him any favors pushing him into the fantastical world of high tech machines.

Yet that is what we do, every day, in almost every public school.

That stone above will outlive any and all of us.

Detail: Bringing our kids back to the Stone Age

0 Digital natives are neither

"If it don't fit, don't force it.
Turn it over and try again."

Cliff, a dockworker at MJ Rudolpf, ca. 1977

Photo by Debbie Egan-Chin, Daily News

I can drive a car reasonably well. I know its basic functions, can dive under its hood with a reasonable idea of what does what (and even fix things occasionally), and I'm cognizant of what a car can (and cannot) do.

I grew up with cars, they were around long before I was born. I am an automotive native.

Still, when faced with driving a new model, I invariably struggle to find the defrost function. I stil struggle with it in our latest car, and we've had it for over two years. No one worries about this, though, because we are all automobile natives, and we all know that I can figure this out on my own.

Henry Ford was not an automotive native. Neither were the many, many folks who drove his Model T's, cantankerous beasts that needed a lot of loving and logic to keep chugging along. Chokes needed pulling, engines needed cranking, and tires (over and over again) needed replacing.

Yet just about anyone who owned a Model T could finagle their way through the myriad maddening Model T problems.

Not because they were natives, but because they were problem-solvers.

Miss Ramey, a school teacher, 1924, via Shorpy

Maybe the myth that a child can figure out a piece of software faster than her teacher says more about the teacher than the child.

Commercial software is made to be sold. "Intuitive" software sells better than clunky code, and pretty much all commercial programs and hardware meant for mass consumption start up in similar ways.

There is nothing amazing about a reasonably bright child picking up a device and figuring how to power it up, no more than a reasonably bright teacher starting and driving a car they've never used before. Praising your two year old using an iPad is like praising him for pooping in a toilet. I'm all for praising toddlers. But pooping and iPadding are both "user friendly" activities.

Problem solving is a an old, generic skill,  It requires reasoning, experimenting, patience, and (in some cases) chutzpah. Humans are (generally) pretty good at it.

Let's not fetishize the machine, nor the child's relationship to it.
Crows can solve problems. Humans can, too.

We should be able to do it better.

My Dad would say that you should not use a machine until you know how it worked.

Detail: Digital natives are neither

0 Crocuses, again

The crocuses are back, spearing their way through last summer's leaves, reminding me (again) that spring is possible.

I lose faith when I lose my way, when I no longer feel the rhythms of the natural world in my bones, when I spend more time under fluorescent light than I do under the sun.

We pretend that we can educate children for a global village, with standards and standardization, through prescribed algorithms. We forget that the lamb in front of us will age, will die, just as we will age, will die.

And in a hundred years, the crocuses will again break through the frozen ground, as alive as you and I are alive today, with as much purpose.

If you do not know what our purpose is for being here, and it is unlikely that you do, then why do you impose the will of strangers on the children in your community?

I think we all need to spend a day just silently watching the sun wend its way across the sky.

Detail: Crocuses, again

0 The carrot and stick approach

With all the confusion of what constitutes good teaching in a classroom these days, complicated by metrics that have little to do with anything, I have learned through the years that the carrot and stick approach works best.

Here's the carrot, grown by a student.
Each year we get one or two, grown by patient students who see to it that their little plant survives these dark wintry months.

And here's the stick:

My Dad's slide rule sits on my desk. Any student can play with it anytime, and they do. It does what it's supposed to do, and continues to do it well, well over 50 years later.

There's joy in a tool that works well in the hands that know it.
Not sure the kids see the joy in the tool, but they recognize the joy in me every time I pick it up.

Some days I think a kid getting the chance to see a happy adult is reason enough for me to be there.

Detail: The carrot and stick approach

0 "Staying in between the lines"

Now and then it keeps you running
It never seems to die
The trial's spent with fear
Not enough living on the outside

Never seem to get far enough
Staying in between the lines
Hold on what you can
Waiting for the end not knowing when

 from "Windfall," Son Volt

Backyard crocuses, 2013

Today marks the last day of the darkest 6 weeks of the year in these parts.
Tomorrow will bring us back to November light.
And Imbolc will be just 3 weeks away.

Under the frozen earth the crocuses next to the old bare oak tree are starting to stir. Chromosomes are replicating, cells dividing, tough spears forming, getting ready to pierce their way to the sunlight.

Not sure they know why they go through all the fuss, not likely a question they they ask, pretty sure the answer wouldn't matter to them anyway.
But they at least know where they're going.

Even if we could decipher the language of plants, we could not grasp their answer to such a question.
It won't involve money or fame or power or self-esteem.
The point may seem without value in a culture that does not value living.

Hard to commodify the thoughts of a flower.

Detail: "Staying in between the lines"

0 Perihelion, again

Just a few hours ago, we got as close to the center of our life force as we are going to get this year, three million (or so) miles closer than we will be in early summer.

North Cape May, ferry jetty

A few thoughts:

• It's amazing that "we" know this.
• It's amazing that the sun is the source of our life's energy. Every breath you take, every thought thunk, is powered by the sun.
• It's amazing that any of us are alive to see it.
• It's amazing that some of us not yet alive will see it next winter, and some of us here now will not.

A matter of perspective, and perspective matters.

Happy Perihelion, folks. Sol Invictus.

Detail: Perihelion, again

0 A song sung

Dave Keeney is a friend of mine, who happens to be brilliant, though that's not a word he'd likely use to describe himself. He's an apple farmer, a musician, a story teller, a mensch.

Dave on the left, Old Town, New Year's Eve
(photo by Derek Daniel)

First time he met my Dad, my Dad (once a fighter pilot) was in bad shape after a series of strokes that made him pretty much unintelligible. Except to Dave. After trading stories, Dave got out his guitar and sang one of the funniest songs I had ever heard, "John Denver's Last Flight."

Later, after dinner, I asked Dave to play the song again. He would not.

"Why not?"
"Don't remember it."
"But you just sang it, how could you forget something you know?"
"I made it up."

What's ridiculous (and telling) is that I still regret not ever hearing that song again, and Dave never gave it a second thought. The song is a song while sung, and that's more than enough for Dave, even as I (and I am embarrassed to say it), thought of the song's potential commercial value..

If the product is the goal, then we lose the "we" in this thing we're doing, whatever this thing we're doing happens to be.

Once an object is made, a song sung, a story scribbled down on the back of of an envelope, it's no longer us, merely an artifact of who we were. We become machines, we are machines, in our relentless chase to create the perfect product, make perfection a standard in whatever we do. We want everything to be professional, the new code word for standardized.

The us is in the process, the joy is in the doing.
A song is a song only as a song is being sung.

Fuck professionalism, it's no way to live nor love.
I'm going back to my ancestors' world of artisans,

Detail: A song sung

0 Biology only matters if life does....

I suppose it's a bit much to ask students to ponder their closeness to plants in a culture where human tribes can barely recognize their similarities with other tribes. Things have broken down.

But I am going to ask you, gentle reader.

• We share the same genetic code--we can make their stuff, they can make ours.
• We both reproduce sexually in a spectacular dance of the chromosomes, mixing us up every generation, so that even the perfect among us are so for only a generation.
• We both rely on ribosomes to build our proteins, microtubules and mitochondria to get us through the day, and an innate will to do whatever we need to see the next sunrise.

Humans and basil share a common ancestor. We share a quarter of the same genes. Many of our proteins do exactly the same thing, others not so much.

But we're pretty damn close at the most basic levels of life. Which is pretty cool.

We're even closer to insects--heck, we're both even animals! We share about 60% of our core genes with fruit flies. 

If something effectively kills plants or insects, and you see no connections between plants and insects and humans, then you likely do not contemplate the tons and tons and tons of herbicides and pesticides poured on our food in our "war" against weeds and weevils.

If you don't contemplate about food or water or folks in your neighborhood, it's unlikely you contemplate much about anything that matters.

Hey, what's on TV tonight?

Detail: Biology only matters if life does....

0 Teacher preacher

I have been wrestling with teaching kids "science" now for years, and it comes down to this:
If a child has no real connection to the natural world, all I can do is preach.
And preaching does not work.

We got plenty of preachers telling all of us what to think believe.
And most of us are devout believers in things we hardly recognize as dogma.

Turn the sound of your television.
Watch the images stream by.
They define us--if they did not, we would not watch them.

Any child with a true interest in the world of the senses, the world of touch and taste, sound and smell and sight, the world that (for whatever reason) flows within patterns of the physical and physics, well, that child has a chance in developing interest in the only real world we have.

A child who  learns to manipulate symbols for extrinsic gain--first to please her parents, then to make a living--can become a proficient scientist without knowing the world. We have plenty of professional preachers who have little connection to The Christ.

If you can't find the ground beneath your feet, you are lost.

(Doesn't mean she will become a scientist--
no one has an obligation to professionalize wherever joy takes them. But she will be a better citizen.)

Detail: Teacher preacher

0 A pill bug prayer

Less than a mile away, in the gray shadows of a closed classroom, a pill bug wanders around some compost, feeling relief as it moistens it gills. It stumbles onto a fellow pill bug, exchanges greetings with a brief twitching of touching antennae, then ambles over to a piece of potato.

Wild pill bug, loitering on a North Cape May driveway.

It sees light we know exists, but no human will see today.
It knows sound we know exists, as an old analog clock ticks a few feet away.
It knows of existence, and the existence of others like it.

Christmas means nothing, of course, to a critter no bigger than a wheat berry.
But living does.

The light is returning.
Amen.

There is joy and wisdom in silence and darkness.

Detail: A pill bug prayer

0 I am a racist

I come from an unusual school in an unusual district. We are not a white or a black or a Latino school. We are not Muslim or Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Sikh. We hear Bengali, Spanish, Greek, English, Patois, and maybe another couple dozen languages and dialects in our hallways.

Crispus Attucks, first death in American Revolution
via Crispus Attucks Museum website

I'm not going to ruin all this by claiming a Kumbaya moment, but what makes this building work maybe better than most others is the constant infusion of immigrants into our town, an infusion of confusion, that keeps us all wondering who we are.

I've heard several times a different version of that discussion, as a small group of kids will discuss just which banner they fall under.

And that's a good place to start.

***

The other race conversation is the one acknowledging the price of color in this fine land of ours. The problem is not starting "the conversation" about race. Most kind, nice folks I know are eager, too eager, to start the conversation.

The problem is getting past the niceties, the politeness, the veneer of civility that subtly reflects our standing with each other.

The problem with the hard conversation is that most white folks I know truly believe two things:

• They're not racist.
• If they're not racist, then this does not involve them.

This skirts the whole issue of privilege, neatly tidied up in a universal statement of our humanity, and who could possibly argue with the idea that an unbiased, nice person who just wants everybody to get along had nothing to do with, well, John Crawford? 

Here's a place to start. You're not going to get off the bottle until you acknowledge you're a racist. Not a John Birch Society heavy drinking racist, just the social two cocktail kind. The kind who sits on the sidelines tsk tsking away a world that does not concern you.

But it should.
Make the declaration, then let's try having the talk. 

And if it does not, you are in deeper than you think.

Detail: I am a racist

0 Going for the gold

Wheat, despite what we believe, is made mostly of air, not earth, and will always be, no matter what we think. We can live out our lives in ignorance, convinced we are right, and wheat plants will not change, spinning air into sugar, a greater gift than Rumpelstiltskin's skill with straw. Grace.

The value of gold is a human conceit. An ounce will get you $1200 today, an abstract string of symbols that can be traded for over 5 metric tons of wheat berries, almost 200 bushels of wheat, about 8000 loaves, a loaf a day for over two decades, enough to get me well into my eighth decade, should I live so long. Greed.

The wheat is dying now, because the light is dying.
The light will return, as will the wheat.
And many of us will die before then, working for our Rumpelstiltskin masters, when all we had to do was just step outside.

And yet we teach our children to value metal over life.

Go ahead, prepare your children for college, for careers, for a life dependent (or so they think) on the spot price of a troy ounce of gold on the market. I'll find my gold in the light reflecting off the dying plants of autumn.

You can, too....

Detail: Going for the gold

0 Fuck pink

These words, posted 5 years ago, started as a visceral response to a friend who coined
 "The One-Boobed Systyrs of the Apocalypse." She's still fighting dead.

I remember the first breast I saw no longer attached to the body it once helped define. I had seen body parts in various forms before, but this one was fresh. A flap of sallow skin with a wizened nipple defining it, a long trail of fibrous fatty tissue trailing off the slab.

The pathologist, smoking as he dictated, handled the breast like a butcher handles meat about to be weighed, though not as kindly.

The breast had been part of a man who probably did not survive his bout with breast cancer. Most people back then did not fare well, and men fared worse than women.

Incidences of breast cancer change in populations as people migrate from one area of the world to another, suggesting that environmental factors contribute to this disease. There is a continuing effort at the NIEHS to identify these environmental factors and the role that exposures to specific chemicals could play in this disease.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH

I shaved my mother's head when the cancer recurred--bony metastases in her skull made the shaving more difficult. She walked like a marionette with tangled strings the weeks before she died. In a radiology reading room, we'd call them "goobers." Goobers on the brain.

Unless it was one of our mothers, our sisters, our daughters--then they were metastases.

***

Since 1985, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals has been the sole funder of October's National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). Zeneca has promoted a blame-the-victim strategy to explain away escalating breast cancer rates, which ignores the role of avoidable carcinogens. Zeneca's parent company, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), is one of the world's largest manufacturers of petrochemical and chlorinated [organic] products -- including the plastic ingredient, vinyl chloride -- which has been directly linked to breast cancer, and the pesticide Acetochlor.

In addition, Zeneca is the sole manufacturer of Tamoxifen, the world's top-selling cancer drug used for breast cancer. In return for funding the "awareness" campaign, ICI/Zeneca has control and veto power over every poster, pamphlet and commercial produced by NBCAM.

" A decade-old multi-million dollar deal between National Breast Cancer Awareness Month sponsors and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) has produced reckless misinformation on breast cancer," said Dr. Epstein.

"Chemical Industry Funds Breast Cancer Campaign"

Cancer Prevention Coalition

The media focuses on the strength of cancer survivors, and I have seen tremendously strong women live and die graciously through months and years of chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. The magazines will show glossy pictures of proud women, and these things matter, of course. Avon will sell "Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer Lipsticks," Mars, Inc., will sell you pink and white M&M's, and General Electric will sell you a Senographe 2000D mammographer.

They do not show a mother cowering in her bathroom, her bald head bare, blood all over the toilet from a nosebleed that will not stop, her teen-age son standing awkwardly, bravely holding her head.

They do not show the vomiting, the pain, the fear. They do not show a mother with her arm in a machine trying to squish out the fluid building up from lymphedema.

They do not show the bony protuberances on a skull, the smell of dying cells.

They do not show a child wiping her mother clean because she is too proud to use a bedpan and too weak to use a toilet.

***

dichlorodiphenyl-dichloroethene
polychlorinated biphenyls

dieldrin
chlordane

heptachlor
polychlorinated dibenzodioxins

In 1991, these were the 6 most common carcinogens found in breast milk. The news has gotten worse since then. We are at the top of the food chain--toxins accumulate.

It has been known that breastfeeding reduces your chance of getting breast cancer. The longer you breastfeed your babies, the lower the risk. This has been attributed to hormonal changes related to breastfeeding--breastfeeding women cycle less, and had less exposure to estrogen.

There has been speculation (and it is only speculation), that breastfeeding may help reduce the chemical pollutant load on the mother. Guess who gets the chemicals.

***

The lifetime risk of a woman developing breast cancer was just less than 10% in the 1970's, or 1 in 10; it is now 13.4%, or almost 1 in 7 (NCI, 2005). In the 1940's, the risk was 1 in 22. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death in women 34 to 54 years of age.

Until recently, the incidence of breast cancer had gone up about a percentage point every year since 1940.

***

Janet Jackson flashes a breast, and our Federal Government now rushes to redefine obscene. Certain words and phrases will cost lots of money; Howard Stern has opted to put his voice into orbit.

Here's an obscene phrase that won't cost anything--in fact, in past Octobers you have might hear it dozens of times:

Early Detection is the Best Protection.

This makes no sense--once detected, you already have it. The best protection is prevention which, admittedly, would require massive, radical changes in the way we live. The NBCAM folks got wise--they now say "Early Detection Saves Lives"--if you go to their website, they pretend that this is what they have always said.

So it must be true.

I wrote this several years 8 or 9 ago for a friend,who was still fighting at the time, and my mother, who "lost."

Detail: Fuck pink