Resistance: A journal entry

            We sit around the table in candle light after all the dishes have been cleared. A girl mentions prospering pharmaceutical companies and I soon find myself revealing the ghost tracks between various business heads in America. The conversation zones in on cancer, and I mention some information a biochemist friend told me. Cancer is not so much the result of trace toxins in your food, your deodorant, your makeup, or your toothpaste, but your DNA breaking five times in the same place. Odds are, when it binds again it’ll get the code wrong and a mutation will occur. My friend looks at me with big hazel eyes, “So they know what causes cancer. You mean they can cure my Grandpa who’s on Chemo?”
            Our conversation flitters from soldiers, to AIDS, to animal testing. I mention a radio piece that made me cry: In the 1950s the U.S. government developed vaccinations by giving prisoners and patients in insane asylums various diseases.  One girl hesitates before she talks. “Think about it though,” she says, “I’m happy I don’t have Polio or Mumps. We’ve come a long way.”

            “You have to look at the origins of things,” I answer. “We accept these diseases as our reality, but they didn’t always exist. You need to look at how they got here. Some diseases are the result of living too close to our own shit, eating the brains of another creature, or feeding an animal its parent. Look 100 years into the future and civilization will have created one more disease we accept as a reality and who pays?”

            Suddenly, I feel I’m getting close to a tangible definition of what sustainability means. As my speech intensifies, I can see people withdrawing. It’s a fine line between preaching and explaining. As we all fall silent, I stare down at the table and can see the fluid line between government subsidies, banks, malnourished children, and wealthy pharmaceutical companies so well I could trace it. I sense I’m near the heart of the beast here in Jerusalem. And as I stand next to this wet, hot, beating organ I feel the urge to puncture it with my pen, to let thousands of years of blood spill out until everyone can see what they’re bathing in.