The Depraved and the Indifferent

I received more mail this morning from the bovine, as I do every morning, and the story was about the Occupy Monsanto protest in Queen’s Park in Toronto as well as the rest of the world, on the 17^th of September.  They are “unified in exposing GMO food and industry; pushing GMO’s out of our food supply; and at minimum, demanding labeling of GMO products in North America.” Apparently the turnout was not overly impressive in Queen’s Park but the necessary communications in networking were made to create progress in this issue.

photo from the bovine

While I am 100% in agreement with exposing Monsanto for the chem giants they are and educating the public about the very wrongness of a herbicide/poison making company also monkeying around with the foods we buy and feed our families, I don’t believe milling around an indifferent government office is going to accomplish anything. Today, the quickest way to being ignored or marginalized is to gather and protest. The gov’t and the media have done it’s job at turning any protest into a circus to be ridiculed and sloughed off as an irritant. While protesting will and does bring focus briefly onto the subject—from the general public who happen to be walking/driving by or who follow such issues like I do from the the bovine, every other person who has to go to work, take care of kids or elderly relatives or simply think the whole Occupy movement is ridiculous is not paying attention.

It’s a counter-intuitive stance to take but for every person standing outside with a sign and a loud shout, there are five armchair protesters who do nothing. Educating the public who are apathetic as to what is going on with their food is an uphill battle that I don’t believe starts at the top, aka the government. Yes, they are the policy makers but they are also solely concerned with money, not what the average citizen has to say.

I firmly believe, and that is why I started this blog in the first place, is that the individual is the place to start. Once we begin to learn about the very things we should be concerned about and to utilize the information within our own microcosm of the family and individual, then we can see change start to trickle UP.

The respective governments of the United States and Canada will unequivocally state that in a world with a population: land use ratio like what is a reality today, it is a necessity to make ‘designer foods’ in order to increase production to feed us. BigBusiness will, and does, try to state this in a way to make us believe that it is global concern for people and not profits that motivates them but we can just throw that out right now as a lie. Of course it is a lie. You don’t go from a 40 year monopoly in chemical warfare to altruism and hand-holding around the campfire singing folk songs. Just doesn’t happen. Monsanto and companies like them have their mission statement firmly in place and they are not looking to adopt a ‘kinder, gentler’ world vision. That does not bring home the big bucks, which we all know, or should, is the bottom line. Period.

Press conference on the threat of GM wheat

Change at the top starts at the bottom. Us. The everyday citizen. We have to remember that we outnumber the politicians, the CEO’s of too BigBusiness, the supporters of said peoples aka those whose palms are being greased and those who are waiting their turn at the lube bottle. We have the power to enforce change simply through our purchases and the level of involvement we decide to take in their world of spend, spend, spend.

Can you imagine if we took the population of just one province and educated them to the point of action—stop buying from companies that support GMO’s, heavy industrial farming and the use of dangerous pesticides—what a difference it would make? Now multiply that by ALL the provinces in Canada and ALL the states in America—these companies and Governments would have to change their standards and policies.

Right now, as things stand, education and availability of non-tampered foods is woefully inadequate. Some of us make a ineffectual stab at shopping local or we placate ourselves with lowering our meat-filled dinners or we watch the news and shake our heads at the depravity of a company’s behaviour in third world countries but we are discouraged to do more. How? By being distracted with the new and latest “innovation” brought to you by your BigGrocery store. New labels, new products carrying less of the bad and more of the good, increasing the amount of seasonal, local produce, new meats being offered with no anti-biotics but with a definite increase in the price tag, and new advertisements extolling said improvements. We allow ourselves to be soothed with empty words of false concern.

On the surface, which is where we are only supposed to look, these ‘improvements’ seem a good thing—and they are to a miniscule extent. What they truly are is a binky, a soother we can suck on and just go away. It’s like asking your parents for an increase in your allowance and receiving monopoly money. “There, you got what you asked for, now go away, No I don’t care that you can’t spend it anywhere, it’s money isn’t it? That’s what you wanted and that’s what you got” What would you do in response? Get a job or raise a protest? Probably go your own way and get a job. That is what is necessary here—go your own way and buy the foods you know are right to eat and not what they give you; go your own way and get a job educating yourself and using that education whenever you shop.

We vote with our feet and wallets and it is high time we all realized that and DID it. It’s one thing to read about it and another to make the commitment to send a message to these companies that we are not increasing their profit margin anymore. We don’t have to gather in groups to do this, we don’t have to make enormous changes in our eating habits, we don’t have to increase our workloads to eat and shop better. We do however, have to learn—who supplies chem-free foods; who is local and small that could do with our shopping dollars, how do they raise their meat, which stores carry seasonal and local products, where do the restaurants we’re eating at get their supplies.

 It is not a difficult task, regardless how much we may be made to believe that, and it is something we can all do right down to the youngest member of the family. In the age of the internet, this information is literally at our fingertips and we can make better decisions. By doing something so simple we can send a message of NO MORE to everyone from the BigGrocery store on the corner to the BigBastards at the top of the skyscraper.

The answer does not lie in attacking the 1% or dragging them down to level the playing field. The answer lies in our pulling ourselves UP.


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