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Archive for January, 2008

Picking Up the Torch

John Edwards left the race to the White House yesterday. In his farewell speech he asked that the remaining Democratic candidates pick up the torch that he carried.  While neither Hillary or Obama has publicly stated that they will indeed make the issue of poverty the main message of their campaign I think it would behoove them and the Republican candidates to heed Edwards words and focus on this subject.

Currently, McCain’s coffers are low. In December they were in the red and despite raising a large amount of funds he is not getting the donations  he needs.  Why? Perhaps it is because as a country we don’t have the extra money to give.  We are too busy trying to buy gas, expensively shipped food, sending our kids to school and trying to keep our jobs.  We don’t have the time or money to spend on such things as campaign funds.  We don’t want to either.  We want to see results from our candidates before we pass them a percentage of our paychecks these days. Our money is too hard won not to.

Today the U.S. has a disgraceful level of poverty.  We hear about it all the time but we have turned a blind eye. Our shelters are stretched thin.  We are not donating as much as in years pass because we ourselves are finding we need those donations now too.  In a country such as ours where we sell jeans for the price of $180 we have over 37 million people living in poverty.  We have children growing up with little no healthcare. This is how we raise a nation? We need more than words from a candidate. We need action.  We need togetherness and no more of this my party, your party verb-age.  We as a country need to listen to men like John Edwards and not give up.  We have a voice. We need our candidates on both sides to hear us loud and clear. We are a country in trouble.  We need to work together to find a way out.  We truly need a ”uniter and not a divider” this time around. 

I ask that regardless of your political affiliation you demand, not just ask, your candidate to begin work on the war on poverty. That they begin the work that desperately needs to be done to bring this country together again.  All over blogs, political or otherwise, it is clear, we are a nation that is calling out. We need our leaders to be more than just talking heads.  We need them to do their jobs as public servants.  We need a leader that shuts its own mouth for a bit, that listens and listens and then really listens and then acts on behalf of the people he or she was elected to serve, not on behalf of themselves or their legacy.

You Mess With My Sushi, You Mess With Me

Recently, the New York Times conducted an investigation into the safety of sushi in 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants and found that mercury levels in tuna sushi were so high at a few of these establishments that “the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market.”

Uh, what? That is some seriously toxic sushi!

Now, I must say that I love me some sushi and the realization that I now have to worry that eating a few pieces of raw tuna could actually be so toxic that I should probably just avoid it altogether…well, that just makes me downright mad.

Fish is (or should be) one of the healthiest foods we can eat, supplying our bodies with omega-3 fatty acids, reducing our risk of death from heart disease, and supplying DHA, which aids in infant brain development.

But due to environmental contamination, fish also contain all sorts of toxins, such as mercury, dioxins and PCBs - stuff that no one wants in their bodies, especially women of childbearing age.

So, should we eat fish or not? It’s all very confusing. Last fall, The Washington Post ran an article about a non-profit study by the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition urging women to ignore the FDA guidelines on limiting fish consumption and to increase fish consumption for optimal health.

The Environmental Working Group (bless their wonderful hearts) cried foul, noting suspicious financial fish industry ties to the study. To quote the EWG press release:

The underlying goal of the seafood industry is to perpetuate the myth that there is a debate about the risks of mercury in fish. The media has fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

There is in fact no debate. The FDA advice is clear. Pregnant women, and women who are thinking about becoming pregnant should eat no more than 12 ounces of fish per week, no more than 6 ounces of albacore tuna, and no shark, tuna, mackerel, or swordfish at all. In stark contrast, this study actually recommends unlimited consumption of two fish on FDA’s do not eat list, and still most of the media did not bother to check whether the FDA, CDC or the American Academy of Pediatrics had any concerns with the findings.

What I find so disturbing about all of this (besides the downright underhandedness of the fish industry’s tactics and their blatant disregard for population health) is that my right to good health and my children’s right to good health is being totally undermined by our government’s lack of standards when it come to keeping our environment clean. Eating fish (healthy, uncontaminated fish) is important to staying healthy - and even important for brain development - and yet, we cannot safely do that anymore.

When are our government officials going to wake up and decide that we cannot continue polluting our planet to this degree anymore?

I mean, even sushi isn’t safe anymore. If that’s not a wake-up call. I don’t know what is.

**********

Check out the Environmental Working Group’s Safe Fish List for more info on the safest fish choices.

The Real Surge

South Carolina has come and gone. But the political landscape looks much different than it did just two days ago.

There’s been a major atmospheric shift in the presidential election. Did anyone really see Barack Obama winning the South Carolina Democratic primary by such a huge margin? The winds, for the moment, are blowing in a new direction, but I’m not sure whether they’re stirring up a hurricane or just a temporary breeze.

The demographic breakdowns are out and we all know which types of voters went for which candidates. I’m sure the cable news networks will be busy dissecting those results at least until Super Tuesday.

As they do, I have one suggestion – while you’re focusing on whether the color of our skin or our two X chromosomes played a bigger role in Obama’s victory, spend some time analyzing the size of the voter turn-out, as well.

That’s where the real “surge” story is these days.

In 2004 about 290,000 people voted in the South Carolina Democratic primary — this year, that many people had voted by lunch time. The total voter turn-out was almost double what it was four years ago.

Double.

It’s no secret that we Americans tend to take our right to vote for granted and like to find excuses to stay at home on election day. But it seems like something started in Iowa and New Hampshire that some thought was an aberration from the excitement over the first two big contests.

An electoral nerve has been touched and voters have responded in a major way, and I’m betting that the folks who are getting ready for the primaries on February 5 had better have lots of extra ballots, plenty of bottled water and the patience of Job, because the voters are coming like we haven’t seen for a long time.

What is clear is that record numbers of Americans, at least for the moment, have said with their actions, ‘We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.’ How can that be anything but good?

What do you think? Is there a change a’coming in how we view our right to have a say in who’s going to sit in the Oval Office? Or was it just a slow day at the office?

You can also find Joanne at her place, PunditMom.

Target and the Reusable Bag

I found a nice surprise at Target today: reusable bags! For a buck!

I found them in the dollar section in the front part of the store (do all Targets have this? I read something about how Targets in South Florida have had a ton of success with the dollar section). They are red, natch, and come all zippered up like a little cosmetic case. But when you unzip - poof! - a bag!

I scooped three up and may go back for more.

I’m impressed Target, I’m impressed!

Princesses Are Not Welcome

My daughter recently came back from a stay at Casa de Nana’s and with her came a pair of pink slippers.  I don’t shun pink all together but I don’t love it.  When I found out I was having a girl I asked for ‘no frills, no pink’, but I still ended up with four loads of pink clothes after a baby shower.  So while I allow some pink to fall into our lives I am iron-fisted about the ‘No Princess’ rule in our house.

There should be a sign on my front door that states, “Divas, princesses, queens and the odd fairy need not apply”.  I just don’t want the influence that the princess toys, clothing and other assorted products seem to cause. I think my daughter is beautiful just not pretty, pretty princess beautiful.  She can play dress-up and have all the whimsy and fun without the princess factor I believe. 

So these slippers, stuffed way down deep in the overnight bag, enter our home and I immediately gasp.  They are ugly.  They are bright pink with silver embroidery on them in the design of a crown. There is a cheap paste gem atop the crown the size of my index fingernail.  Above the gem is the word ‘princess’. I cringed.  How could she?!  How could my mother-in-law break the rule? I know grandparents indulge kids and don’t always listen to the parents but this is something that could not be ignored. The shoes do not even fit.  She has to grow into them! Aye! They will be in our house forever now, I fumed.

My husband thought I was being irrational.  He did until I told him to look at them again.  He did and uttered this, “Augh. They look cheap.  They look very….WalMart. Toss them.”  And that my friends is why I married him. 

If You Really Think John Edwards is Some Kind of Corporation Hating Extremist Nut…

You need to listen to this. Then try to tell me with a straight face that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Why We Didn’t Circumcise Our Sons

In 1994 I wasn’t much concerned with that “extra” flap of skin sometimes found on the end of a penis. I was just leaving my teen years in 1994. I had seen exactly seven naked men (I hadn’t even seen my father or stepfather’s genitalia) and all were circumcised. I heard nasty rumors about uncircumcised men from my friends…none of whom had ever seen an uncircumcised penis firsthand. Men with uncircumcised penises were “dirty” and “unclean” and you could get V.D. from them! They were weird. The sex was different, not as good (though there was no real explanation for this). Then there were the stories about the foreskin growing together, debacles with zippers and hangers and, of course, the infamous story about the foreskin that wouldn’t retract around an erect penis…the trapped erect penis causing much pain…or that’s the way they told it. I believed much of this until I had a boyfriend with an uncircumcised penis. I didn’t even know that he was uncircumcised until months after we started dating. We had already had sex many times. The sex was good. We did it in the dark, like most 19 and 20 year olds. I hadn’t given him oral sex yet. There was nothing that would have indicated to me that he still had his foreskin intact. Then he told me one day, when I suggested that we have sex during the day. His parents were gone (both of us still living at home confined most of our sex to night time hours) and I wanted to take advantage of this rare moment of privacy. He soberly looked at me, and in that brief moment I thought for sure that he was going to break up with me, tell me that he had a venereal disease and/or suggest that we try some wildly perverse sexual act. He wanted to prepare me because he had had bad experiences with springing the foreskin on past girlfriends. I didn’t know what to think. I was silent for a short while, thinking about all the dangerous and scary images that arose from the rumors and stories I had heard from friends and friends of friends. Enflamed and trapped penises danced in my head. Oozing, disgusting, dangerous V.D. ridden penises taunted me. But we had been tested for venereal diseases before we had sex…together, in fact. I didn’t even notice all these months…how different could it be?

He unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out of his boxer shorts. In the light of day, there it was. Flaccid, his uncircumcised penis looked like a small elephant trunk. I imagined the ends of his foreskin strong enough to pick up objects from the ground…a pencil, a coffee mug. It definitely did not look like the penises I had known, but there, beneath the foreskin I could see the outline of a familiar shape. A friendly dome lurked there, draped by this thin layer of skin. When I saw the familiar shape of a penis head I felt safer, more relaxed. This moment, this relaxation, was more important to my future than I could have known then. With all the examination, my face scientifically scrunched, he started to get erect and we picked up right where we left off, before I knew he was uncircumcised.

The boyfriend and I didn’t last for more than a few months but the experience of seeing an uncircumcised penis stayed with me. My friends treated me like a penis guru. Because it was so uncommon for men to be circumcised in America, I was the only one among my friends who had ever seen an uncircumcised penis in the flesh. My friends told their friends and eventually it became typical to have girls outside my circle of friends come up to me at parties, at school, at coffee shops…shyly asking questions when the topic opened up in conversation. They acted as though my ex-boyfriend’s penis was exotic, special, unusual.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I started reading the works of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American literary theorist. His specialty was postcolonial studies and I found a connection between my ex-boyfriend’s uncircumcised penis and these postcolonial critical premises. Circumcision is a custom, a cultural practice. Here in America we talk about the medical benefits of circumcision…attempting to badly and inaccurately rationalize why a great percentage of the world does not circumcise (including Western countries) and we do. But ultimately when pressed to answer why an American parent has circumcised their child, more often than not the answer is that they prefer their children to look like their fathers and fear social stigma if they do not adhere to the norms of society. Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), talks about a process by which the Western world has, intentionally and sometimes subconsciously, undermined the customs, value and culture of the East through faulty assumptions in order to further imperialist and capitalist impulses. To make something exotic or “oriental” is to make it different from the norm, to marginalize it, categorize that practice or that something as weird, different…Other.

When we think about those who are Other or things that are Other, we often feel fear because we find ourselves in a territory that is uncomfortable, not home. Those on the fringes of a society are usually feared. Cultures that we don’t understand and are foreign to us are feared. Fear is a big part of our lives in America. While many people from different cultures come to live in America, rarely do we embrace the cultural practices of the immigrant…rather the immigrant becomes “Americanized” and this is seen as a good thing. We tend to become resentful and fearful of immigrants who retain their culture rather than adopting our American customs. It is fear that drove many at the start of the 20th century to begin circumcising their baby boys.

The germ theories in the early 1900’s and new advances in medical technology spurred the growth of hospitals and increased the significance of the role of medical professionals. Procedures and events like births or even illnesses, otherwise handled with home remedies or overseen by specifically appointed members of society (midwives, apothecaries, local healers) were now handled by doctors, with drugs and specialized tools, in hospitals and offices. Medical care was expensive and generally the poor continued to use more homespun methods of dealing with illness, had home births and rarely went to see doctors at all. As a result, getting care from a doctor became a mark of social status. To make money, the medical world began to create a culture of fear of disease and infection, which were real threats, but perhaps were exaggerated with the hope of increasing profit. The same social forces that pushed childbirth out of the home and into the hospital helped create hysteria in the parents of baby boys. An uncircumcised penis was a symbol of the “backward” East (this idea mainly presented by an imperialist British medical community, which spread the idea to American doctors), a haven for germs and infection, whereas the circumcised penis symbolized the new Western medicine, modern science…clean, germ and infection free. Propaganda was used to further these ideas. Women and men were told to forgo their instincts and, instead, put their trust in medical professionals who “knew better.” Circumcision is yet another procedure that is unnecessary and a tool of the medical world to generate money.

As modern medicine advanced, the idea that doctors knew a person’s body better than the owner of that body became more prevalent, so much so that today we sometimes forget that the body is a relatively self-efficient organic machine, which generally needs little intervention. Enter me in my graduate school phase. After reading Derrida, Foucault, Friedan, Said, Greer, Paglia, Said, Spivak….I decided that there was no way that I would entrust, without question, my body or my mind wholeheartedly to any institution. I would question authority throughout. So when I got pregnant with our first son in the middle of the last year of graduate school, I thought long and hard (no pun intended) about the issue of circumcision.

My husband is cut. When the issue of circumcision came up it came up early in my pregnancy and my man brushed aside the notion that we would do anything different to our own child. He had never even thought about the subject. He had never even really thought about his own circumcision. I was in a strange position. Having strong feelings about questioning Western medicine’s approach to the body, but not a man with a penis myself…I didn’t even know if I had a right to push the issue. He is the dad, I thought to myself, this is his area. But the further my pregnancy progressed, the more I could feel my son move from inside my body, the more I felt that I should have a say in this decision too.

We started doing research. We talked to our friends. We took impromptu polls. Like many American men, my husband responds much better to statistics and numbers than to emotional appeals. The more we researched and talked and debated and polled, the more we became convinced that circumcision was not the way for us. Many of my own preconceived notions about circumcision were challenged during my personal investigation of the practice. During this process our friends and family members questioned our motives for resisting circumcision.

Don’t you want your son to look like his father?

After reading many horror stories about botched circumcisions I practically laughed at this question out loud. Doctors are not sculptors. As far as aesthetics go, I trust Nature to make things beautiful and doctors to help heal us when we are ill. I’ve yet to see doctors create anything that comes near the perfection of Nature. There is nothing sickening or ugly about an uncircumcised penis. The body is beautiful when it is born, in it’s many different emanations. We need to be aware of the ways in which we are conditioned and socialized. Familiarity does not always equal “normal.” And you have to ask yourself, “How did I get familiar with this ______ in the first place?” I know that when I first saw a penis in the flesh, I wasn’t exactly comfortable with it. I had to become familiar with it before that could happen. Furthermore, as my husband pointed out to me, every penis, circumcised or not, looks different from the next one. There are black penises and white penises. There are short, pale ones and fat, pink ones. Some look like the head is a mushroom, or a helmet or a cap. Also, penises change over time. A man starts out with no pubic hair with smooth skin, turns into an adult, grows hair, grows old and his skin wrinkles, his pubic hair turns white. Line up one hundred naked fathers and sons and I think you will find that it is difficult to identify who is related merely by the “look” of their penis.

Won’t he get teased in the locker room? Women won’t want to have sex with him!

Absurdity! Children can be cruel, teenagers more cruel. They will find any reason to tease if they want to tease you. As a child I was made fun of for a host of reasons that could and could not be controlled by myself, or my parents and the bullies were always searching for material. Why give bullies the material to mock my child, you ask. We will never be typical in our house. There’s a high chance that regardless of whether or not we allow our sons to be circumcised, they will be teased. We have tattoos and listen to punk rock. We are unconventional in our values and beliefs. There are many reasons. And many circumcised boys, with very traditional families, who are well-liked by classmates are also teased. In fact, the majority of people I know were teased in school, while the bullies remain in the minority. Why succumb to bullies when they are the minority? My husband did not see another man’s penis (other than his father’s as he climbed out of the shower once) until he was in high school. By then, most of these fifteen year olds were too shy and afraid to get caught looking at another young man’s genitals, straight or gay. Glancing at another person’s genitals in the high school locker room is a much worse sin than merely having an uncircumcised penis.

A circumcision is a cut by which the foreskin of the penis is removed. Cutting, by any person in any environment, incurs risks. A cut must heal. Not everyone heals the same. Scarring and infection can occur, though rarely, in circumcision. However low the risk, I reasoned with my husband and myself that if women are going to avoid our sons, if people are going to make fun of them because of the look of their penises, I’d rather that happen without having to subject them to pain and possibly life threatening infection. And there are many incidents in which newborn babies have died, become ill and/or come away from circumcision with a scarred and disfigured penis.

As for women and whether or not they would want to have sex with my uncut sons…see my anecdote about my ex-boyfriend. When I asked him once about whether or not women thought his penis was “weird” or “disgusting” he laughed. In short, most were curious and that gave him an advantage over many other men with circumcised penises. Not one woman had ever been repulsed by his penis. Surprised, yes. Repulsed, no.

Uncircumcised penises are difficult to take care of.

Whoever came up with this one is just a dunce. If you can’t wash your own genitals with water, what are you doing making decisions for a newborn baby? Additionally, infants and toddlers don’t need any kind of special care for their uncircumcised penises because their penises aren’t retractable until approximately the age of 5. Even then, the only extra care that a boy with an uncircumcised penis needs to take is to wash the area periodically to remove smegma. That’s it. Pretty simple. All you need is water and a clean washcloth. Is that difficult?

One night at a party, when I was eight months pregnant with our first son, my husband was asking his friends about their opinion on this issue. Our friend Chris’ inhibitions were lowered due to the consumption of many, many beers. He recounted the following cautionary tale to Shannon:

“So this uncut dude was like camping out in the woods all rudimentary style. He just had like his tent and some camping supplies and shit. He was waaaaaay out in the middle of the desert, like no lakes or rivers around. And he got real dirty and you know what, man? That guy’s Johnson got all infected and nasty because he couldn’t clean it properly out there in the desert.”

Uh huh. I’m sure that happened. Question: was this genius camping out in the desert without any kind of water? Without one clean piece of cloth? Excellent reason for us to subject our tiny baby to a shiny sharp-ass scalpel.

Isn’t it cleaner to have a circumcised penis?

Yes and no. We tried not to laugh at these questions, we really did.

What would be extremely clean for all human beings, and in order to avoid infections, is if we could find a way to eliminate all dark, moist, enclosed areas of the body. That’s right! How about we start with our ear holes? The vagina is next. Nostrils follow. Oh yes…the mouth last. Any dark, moist and enclosed space is a haven for germs. We do not remove our ear openings or nostrils merely because there’s a risk that we might get an infection, in fact according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ear infections in children account for more than 30 million physician office visits per year! Should we remove our ear openings? I don’t remember the last time one of my boys needed to be seen by a doctor multiple times in one year for a penis infection.

Perhaps that’s a false analogy…we need our ear holes for hearing. Alright then, does the foreskin have a purpose? It does. According to Dr. George C. Denniston, in his paper “Functions of the Foreskin”(presented to The Second International Symposium on Circumcision back in 1991) “The male foreskin has three important physiological functions that circumcision irreversibly destroys.” Dr. Denniston’s paper outlines those three important functions. First and foremost, the foreskin protects the glans of the penis while it is flaccid. It also allows for the male penis to fully elongate during erection. When the foreskin is removed, the penis glans develops another layer of dermis to protect it, since during circumcision its only line of defense was removed. Since this layer of dermis is slowly grown on top of the glans, it stands to reason that most of the growth of this dermis is during times at which the penis is flaccid. Ultimately, this limits the extent to which a penis can elongate during erection…which, in turn, can limit that man’s ability to inseminate sperm into a female partner. Furthermore, the glans is a very sensitive part of the penis. With another layer of dermis grown on top, sensitivity is decreased, which, in turn, decreases pleasure during sex. So, the foreskin protects, aids in erection and provides sensitivity (not only pleasurable sensitivity, but also protective sensitivity). Why would we then cut off the foreskin?

Many claim that circumcision helps reduce HIV/AIDS. This is true to some extent. However, most of the studies on this issue are based in developing nations where participants in the studies have little to no access to sex education or healthcare. In these places, birth control and condoms are often hard to come by and rarely used (which also accounts for the high number of pregnancies in these nations, despite the poverty and lack of resources). Circumcision will help to reduce HIV/AIDS in men who have repeated unprotected sex. If we think about this issue logically, circumcised men who use condoms correctly have about the same odds of contracting HIV/AIDS as an uncircumcised man who also correctly uses condoms. These studies focus on men who do NOT wear condoms. Worse, the studies themselves are flawed, driven by pro-circumcision advocates who are determined to prove the medical validity of mass circumcision once and for all by linking the procedure with lower HIV/AIDS rates.

The words “clean” and “cleaner” also send up a red flag for me. They are words that have been misused for propaganda by a number of institutions throughout history. The implication is that the intact penis is, of course, dirty to begin with…something like original sin. Hogwash! As my Southern Baptist great grandmother Kate would say. The bodily fluids we excrete are not “dirty” and the human body is not born flawed or unclean. In fact, at birth we are probably the most “clean” that we’ll ever be in our lifetime. The fluids excreted by the body, the semen and the smegma excreted from the sebaceous glands, have a purpose. So does menstrual blood, mucous, sweat, ear wax, saliva…and all those other icky things that come from our bodies. This desecration of the body, treating its natural state as unclean and profane, is a disservice to humanity that spawns all sorts of ills, both medical and social. To continue to believe that our bodily functions are unclean or disgusting is, at best, hearkening back to the Victorian era, a time when doctors were conning wealthy families into handing over their bodies and cash to do with what they pleased in the name of science. What the Victorian families couldn’t have known is that sometimes science can be more painful and complicated than the natural processes of our bodies.

Babies can’t even feel circumcision. They don’t remember it anyway.

Any parent of a newborn becomes attached to that particular baby’s cry almost from the moment of the first utterance. I knew my first son’s voice immediately. Something in me recognized and memorized his sound. My husband too became immediately attached to the sound of our son’s voice. So when they took him down the hall of the maternity ward at one day old to give him his first immunization shots, we jumped and winced when we heard the long sharp peal of his cry at the prick of the needle.

Now, for a moment, visualize a masked person coming at your newborn baby boy, a little infant who has had very minimal contact with the world, who only wants to eat, sleep and defecate now and then. This masked person holds a sharp shiny instrument between gloved fingers. A nurse holds his little arms and torso down as he struggles against these people who are clearly not his Mommy or Daddy. He screams out. Over and over he screams. You do not come to his aid. They apply some local anesthesia which numbs his penis…a strange and disorienting feeling. He is still screaming and you are still not there for him. Then they cut into his small little penis, pulling and stretching out the foreskin so that they can get a cleaner cut. He bleeds. They disinfect the cut and apply antibiotic. Your baby is tense with screaming now. His face has turned beet red and you can hear his calls from down the hallway. They return your baby to your arms and he is shaking, traumatized, breathing irregularly…he barely knows that he’s in your arms. It takes several hours before he returns to calm.

It remains to be seen as to whether or not newborn infants remember the pains they feel later in life. Claiming this memory loss as a good reason to move forward with a very painful procedure is just cruel and unfeeling. There are a lot of painful things that we could subject babies to, but it isn’t in our moral code to do them. Merely because an infant might not remember the pain of circumcision is hardly enough reason to go ahead and do it. But this didn’t even matter to Shannon and I. Our son was in pain just being immunized and his cry told us that it really really really really hurt bad to be stuck by a needle…let alone have a portion of his penis removed. That pretty much did it for us. When the nurses came by to ask about circumcision we emphatically said “No!” To us, the procedure of circumcision became a barbaric practice that we refused to participate in.

The circumcision decision is a highly personal one. I was scared to question the tradition that seemed so prevalent in our society at first. I didn’t want my sons to be stigmatized by society or angry with me for making a decision that would potentially negatively impact them. But once I gathered my courage and gained the support of my husband and family, it became much easier. It was a breeze once I held my sons in my arms and looked into their faces.

While there are many cultures that make male and/or female circumcision a spiritual tradition or a rite of passage, tradition and history are not enough of an excuse to blindly follow the masses. We should never turn over our bodies, or the bodies of our children, to any institution wholesale. As responsible parents we should question these institutions. Whether or not one chooses to circumcise their male child, the decision should be an informed one because it is a decision made for another human being who cannot choose for himself. I encourage every expecting mother to seek out information on circumcision, both pro and con. I am very clearly against circumcision, but there are advocates for circumcision out there and they too have a perspective to share. Making an informed decision about circumcision is a responsibility that we need to take seriously for the health and well being of our sons.

Artificial Sweeteners-How Can Anyone Say They’re Safe With A Straight Face?

This is a topic I have discussed before-with much more vehemence-and I feel the need to revisit it.

 

We all know artificial sweeteners are Evil. Why do we continue to consume them?
Also-why can’t I just have a piece of gum without this shit in it? Just regular sugar in my gum for me, thank you. Seriously- I can’t do gum at all because all of it has some sort of artificial sweetener in it. I’m quite pissed about that.

I understand some people just can’t have sugar, and there should be some sort of substitute, perhaps.

But what about the rest of us? We don’t need it. It doesn’t need to be in everything. It’s not just the gum either-that’s the least of the offenders. It’s made its way into soft drinks, food, juice, you name it.

People, don’t you know it’s all evil (Nutrasweet, Aspartame, Equal, Sweet n’ Low, Splenda)  that it causes all sorts of crazy crap? Headaches, Cancer? Stuff we probably aren’t aware of?

 

Oh, and did you know Splenda turns into splendid Formaldehyde when it reaches a certain temperature? That it can accumulate in the brain and cause irreparable damage?

Take a look at these:
Aspartame-’the most dangerous of all’
This gives an overview on most of the sweeteners, gives side effects of Aspartame and introduces a book by Janet Hull titled Is Splenda Safe? Very informative.

Wikipedia’s article on Sugar Substitutes.

How Splenda was  discovered…

Artificial Sweeteners and Cancer: Q and A
(from Cancer.gov)

 

Aspartame accounts for over 75 percent of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious including seizures and death.(1) A few of the 90 different documented symptoms listed in the report as being caused by aspartame include: Headaches/migraines, dizziness, seizures, nausea, numbness, muscle spasms, weight gain, rashes, depression, fatigue, irritability, tachycardia, insomnia, vision problems, hearing loss, heart palpitations, breathing difficulties, anxiety attacks, slurred speech, loss of taste, tinnitus, vertigo, memory loss, and joint pain.

 

-From http://www.mercola.com/article/aspartame/dangers.htm

 

Okay…So what would it take to get all brands of artificial sweetener out of our food, gum, candy, etc, etc.?

 Books for further reading

The Beauty of Skin Deep: I feel pretty, witty and green!

ifeelpretty_small.jpgSpending a lot of my time on the internet - I’m in some pretty cool company, btw - I have learned a lot of things.

Like, sufficient knowledge on the proper uses of acronyms and emoticons that really helps to speed up conversation.

IFYWIM ;o)

Perhaps one of the most important facts to know is you can find something, on almost anything, if you know where to look.

Riiiiight.

In real life, I am a mother of 4 kids and really would love to find the time to do anything OTHER than get hung up on all the crap that can go on in a houseful of, you know, crappy things that don’t want to work.

Right?

Never mind, worrying about whether I feel pretty (or, NOT) and agonize over the fact that green is the new black.

That’s what blogging friends are for.

It wasn’t until my affiliation with Green Mom Finds - gosh, the site really does look pretty, really - that I became aware of Environmental Working Group (a.k.a. EWG) and just how much of that information is really only fingertips (sadly in need of a manicure) away:

“Our team of scientists, engineers, policy experts, lawyers and computer programmers pores over government data, legal documents, scientific studies and our own laboratory tests to expose threats to your health and the environment, and to find solutions. Our research brings to light unsettling facts that you have a right to know.”

But, wait, there’s more!

Skin Deep, for example, is their searchable cosmetic safety database, allowing regular folks (like you and me) the opportunity to investigate the ingredients on the products we buy:

“Right now, we’ve got 27,069 products in the database, and our goal is 1,000 donations — and 1,000 new products — to kick off the new year.”

As I see it, their I Feel Pretty campaign (now, up and running on Facebook) is pretty cool and if you want to learn more about ewg.org, watch their video and allow them to tell you, themselves, close up and in person.

So, don’t be afraid to ask questions - the OTHER thing I’ve learned from blogging is to say, “WTF?” and “What are YOU going to do about it?” - it feels really good, being even a little green, and you can always thank me, later.

Did I mention you look very pretty, today?

A new resource to check kids’ drink safety

For nearly a year—ever since the lawsuit was filed in Boston alleging that drink companies had unsafe levels of benzene in drinks—we’ve been hearing more about the dangers of benzene in soft drinks.

In short:

Benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia, can form in soft drinks containing two ingredients: Vitamin C, also called ascorbic acid, and either sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate.

The presence of those ingredients doesn’t mean benzene is present. Scientists say factors such as heat or light exposure can trigger a reaction that forms benzene in the beverages.

Source: AP, Boston.com, The Boston Globe

The benzene problem was first discovered over fifteen years ago. Even after identifying the dangers, most manufacturers did not alter their ingredients or formulations as recent tests have shown. The FDA, which had ordered manufacturers to reformulate their drinks—despite the appeal of Vitamin-C fortification to many consumers—is revisiting the issue.

For more information—and if you are unaware of this danger, I do suggest reading further and researching if your family drinks soft drinks—read the informative article about benzene in drinks at SourceWatch. Click here to read.

However, Environmental Working Group is offering a survey and analysis to help you determine safety and to collate useful results:

Trace amounts of benzene and pesticides have been found in sugary drinks like juice, sports drinks, soda, and even chocolate milk.

Take the survey below and help us learn about what your kids are actually drinking — and how safe it is. We’ll send you a free update when we’ve analyzed the results.

Click here to go to the survey and learn more about what your kids are really drinking.

By: Julie Pippert, also blogging at:Using My Words




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