Whether it is the 2009 Christmas Eve Senate passage of a huge, and hugely controversial, health care reform measure by Democrats narrowly controlling the U.S. Senate or, closer to home, Republicans and Democrats waiting until after a general election to craft their respective political handiwork, this is the stuff that alienates and isolates the public from those who have sworn to represent their best interests.

Through any such conversation we must of course be sensitive to Mr. Welch’s experience along the way.  I certainly wish him the best in recovering his health, and appreciate the years of time and service he has given to the Richmond community and the residents of District 5.  It’s not easy to be a political figure in the public spotlight even when you’re healthy, and so we know that it must have been particularly hard on Bing and his family to have health concerns and questions about his ability to serve in that role all mixed in together.

But when someone is elected to represent the interests of voters, their own story is not the only story that needs considering.  Calls for privacy and sensitivity are legitimate to an extent, but I think elected officials at any level should be held to a higher standard than private citizens when life events affect their ability to do their job.  When a health issue actually prevents someone from doing the job at all, or from making the case to voters that they should be re-elected, that’s when the interests of their constituents are most vulnerable, and the most in need of the protection that comes from extreme candor and accountability.

My perspective on this is hardly objective – I campaigned for most of a year for a seat on Council and now someone else will be selected after campaigning for part of an evening.  But one of the mantras repeated by candidates in all parties during the recent campaign was that in order to move Richmond forward, we have to be willing to have hard conversations about sensitive topics without taking it personally.   Talking about what’s best for the voters of District 5 and for City Council is one of those conversations, and those who would suggest that we shouldn’t go there because it might hurt the feelings of the Welch family, or who say that a thirst for information should be satisfied by just trusting that the right thing was done, are missing the point.

Make no mistake, no one is suggesting that any laws were broken or that the local Republican party isn’t well within its rights to caucus and appoint a new District 5 representative until the next election.  You could make an argument about what might be more ethical or “fair” to voters, but in this case and many others, “fair” doesn’t necessarily line up with what’s “legal” according to Indiana law or what’s strategic for a political party.  Like it or not, we have to respect that until the law is changed.

But the point the Pal-Item editorial makes (and that I agree with) is that if we want members of our community to feel like their voices matter in the course of electing and working with government leadership, then we must have a higher standard of transparency and communication on the part of those leaders.  If the motivating vision for would-be leaders in a political context is “win a victory at any cost” instead of “do the right thing for the community,” then we’re not going to make it very far as a city.

We don’t know what really happened behind the scenes with Mr. Welch’s health and subsequent decisions by his party about how to handle his seat on Council; their choice was to share as little information as possible, and only when repeatedly asked to do so.  In the absence of the information that should have been forthcoming, we’re left with the appearance that Bing Welch’s health issues were exploited for political gain, and there’s no forward motion for Richmond that comes from that.

What a world of pure and unflinching justice we could then live in!  To walk around knowing that the slogans and invitations on billboards, newspaper ads and television were all required by law to be true, and that onerous fines and the shame of the public eye awaited the occasional miscreant who would stray from this noble code.  No need to worry about being deceived or misled as a consumer; we could always have confidence that advertisers would stand by their claims.

Like I said, I was young.

But at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I do think there’s been a notable shift in the standards we hold marketers and public figures to when it comes to truth in advertising.  Seems like somewhere around the mid 1990′s, we kind of gave up on it.

Was it when the Coke vs. Pepsi wars heated up?  Or maybe it was when product manufacturing was being outsourced to other countries and business owners became disconnected from quality controls in their production processes?  Or maybe it was when we stopped expecting politicians to tell the truth and started betting on just how outrageous their lies were.  Or maybe The Internet made it so much more difficult to police advertising claims that no one even bothers anymore unless it’s a particularly egregious case.

But there are more important things to worry about, right?  Caveat emptor and everybody for themselves, and let’s focus on the national debt or poverty or obesity, right?

I’m not so sure.  I think deceptive marketing practices deserve more of the blame for the state of the world than they get. I’m glad to hear that some high schools and colleges are teaching young people to be more aware of how marketing influences their buying choices, but the majority of us are still very much subject to the power of the marketing machine.  And when that machine is telling us to do things that are against our own best interests, it matters.

A few recent examples I’ve heard or seen just driving around town:

“Fast and fresh!”
Many fast food restaurants caught on long ago that fast food was associated with unhealthy eating, and that dietary advice was shifting toward recommendations of freshly prepared food with more natural ingredients.  The end result is the self-contradiction that you can have mass-produced food from a restaurant that is both “fast” (because it was pre-prepared halfway across the country in a warehouse and trucked to you frozen or full of preservatives) and “fresh” (because it has a piece of lettuce or tomato on it that was recently washed).  Or, “we have a salad on our menu, so we offer healthy eating options for everyone!” This undermines people who are trying to make healthier eating choices for themselves and their children by convincing them they can have it both ways, and it undermines local/regional food producers who actually ARE bringing you fresh food that you could prepare within a few days for a healthy meal.

“Hurry in to our store to save!”
I heard this one on the radio this morning.  ”Be the hero of your household’s budget,” the ad proclaimed.  They want you to come in to the store and spend money so that you can “save” money.  Buy things you might not have bought otherwise and might not need, so that you can feel good you’re getting them at a slightly lower price than…someone else somewhere else might or might not be selling them for.   This approach twists the notion that “saving money is good” into the idea that you have to spend money to save money.  No wonder we have unprecedented levels of personal debt and bankruptcy.

“For a limited time only!”
This one is tried and true: the idea that a time pressure will almost always result in consumers making different choices than they would make given time to think through the value of what they’re getting.  ”I might not have bought a case of gummy bears THIS week, but surely I’ll need a case in the coming year or two, and this sale ends TODAY!”  Marketers are telling us that rational responses are not to be trusted and that our gut instincts are what we should go with.  Instant gratification is okay because…then you’ll be gratified, and that’s all that matters, right!?

There are many, many more.  And I’m sure none of them are all that surprising to you, because again, we’ve come to accept that marketers are trying to mess with our sense of reality, and that we should just deal with it the best we can.

But why do we accept that?  Why are we willing to subject ourselves to that dance of pain when all we get out of it is some cheap plastic crap, stomach aches and buyer’s remorse?  I’m accepting comments for a limited time only.

I try not to give my my money to companies that practice false or misleading advertising most blatantly. But for me, one of the long-term solutions is to be very, VERY intentional about how I market myself and the products or services I’m associated with.

When I market my own business and our technical services, I try to make sure we speak plainly and clearly about what we can and cannot do, so that no one is misled and no end result is hyped up.

When I tell people who I am and what I stand for, I’m careful to note complexity and messiness where it exists.

When I talk about my qualifications for being voted into elected office, I’m careful not to spin or inflate my experience and accomplishments beyond what’s real, and to give other people credit where it’s due.

When I mess up or say something that might be misleading, I try to go back to correct it as soon as I can.

Sometimes it’s harder to be accurate and honest than it is to be catchy and broadly appealing.  Maybe it’s that younger version of myself still wandering around in oblivion waiting for the FTC to make it all better, but I still hope for a world where we all practice – and expect – truth in advertising at every level.

But if we accept for a moment that people in this country will probably continue to obtain medical services via some kind of national insurance system for the foreseeable future (and coldly put aside the many millions of people without even that benefit right now), then we need to talk about the practice of insurance rescission.

Rescission is literally the process of saying, “this contract we had is no longer valid.”  In the health care system, it’s practiced as the health insurance companies telling their customers that they will not honor the contract to provide insurance, leaving the customer to fend for themselves in paying any medical bills that might be incurred.

Unfortunately, the rescinding of the contract usually happens right when an insured person needs that money the most – they have a medical condition that needs a treatment they could not otherwise pay for themselves, and in evaluating whether or not to cover it, the insurance company gets to say “sorry, you’re on your own.”  Though the companies defend the practice as important to combat fraud, they can do this based on even the tiniest mistake or apparent misrepresentation in your health insurance application paperwork (e.g. you forget to check a box somewhere, you didn’t know the proper medical terminology for something), and it turns out that they often do take advantage of any loophole they can find.  As someone involved in helping my co-workers complete their own insurance applications, this is particularly striking to me, given how complex and confusing those forms can be; I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one of us has some grounds for rescission somewhere in there.

(I’ve referring to “they” and “them” here when it comes to the health insurance companies.  While it’s tempting to think there might be one or two exceptions to the rule, I’m not yet aware of any health insurer that bucks the trend when it comes to building rescission clauses into their contracts.  Do you?)

If you want a sense of how bad this practice has gotten, listen to a recent segment produced by This American Life (it’s in “Act 3: Restrictions May Apply) where they not only have interviews with people who have been deeply wronged by the health insurance companies through rescission, but also play audio of insurance execs being confronted about how they can sleep at night doing this.

I’m not an expert on the health insurance industry, but I have some simple suggestions for how we might want to change this system (again, within the context of keeping some sort of overall national health insurance system):

1. Legally limit rescission to all but the most egregious cases of demonstrably intentional fraudulent activity. If the insurance company can prove under the standards of law that an insured customer set out to abuse the insurance system and succeeded, then they can use those grounds to extract themselves from the contract.  Otherwise, even if there was accidental misrepresentation or inaccurate information provided during the application process, the contract should be fully honored.
2. Improve the attention paid to health insurance applications before coverage is offered. If the insurance companies are going to base rescission practices on administrative typos and errors, they shouldn’t offer coverage to you in the first place until all of those materials have been audited for any possible issues that could cause problems later.  It’s just cruel to give someone the impression that they have insurance coverage when a loophole exists from the beginning that makes it essentially at the whims of the insurers.
3. If a contract is rescinded, the health care company should refund all premiums paid AND some additional corrective payment that addresses the hassle (or life-threatening delays) that someone might be facing as a result of the insurance company’s failure to meet the obligation it said it would.    If I open a savings account at a bank and they decide later that my account has to be closed because of a typo, they don’t get to keep my deposited funds or the interest my account has gained.

Despite my lack of faith in even the best intentions for a new health care system, I do hope that the current debate brings about some incremental positive changes in what we have now.  Ending the practice of rescission as we know it now would be a great step forward.

In short, if you think about what you eat, how it got to you, and the issues of nutrition, morality, politics and spirituality come with it, it is paramount that you encounter what The Vegetarian Myth has to offer.

My full review continues:

Keith‘s central point is that in order for you to live, something else has to die.  While it may seem like a simple enough statement, it may become pretty controversial pretty quickly, especially if you’ve tried to build your diet (or any part of your life, for that matter) around the avoidance of killing other creatures for food or otherwise.  She essentially says that not only are the practices of vegetarians and vegans misguided in their effort to help us lead a more sustainable and just life, they actually often propagate a harmful cultural story about food and the relationship we have to it.  By necessity, I won’t even try to support those statements in this review, as the whole substance of the book is about doing that meticulously; please don’t ask me to summarize her thinking for you.

Given how much being a veg*n becomes a matter of identity for so many, Keith acknowledges right off that these assertions are painful ones to make, let alone to hear and receive.  The potentially biting nature of her premise can only be alleviated by her willingness to explore it so thoroughly and sympathetically, and to share about the close relationship she has to the subject matter.   She tells her personal story of being a long-time vegan, and how she journeyed from an approach to diet that inherently required malnutrition and delusion to one that led to health and awakening.  She knows what’s it’s like to question the foundation of the choices we make about food because she’s been doing it rigorously and relentlessly for much of her life:

I know what you want to be true, vegetarians.  You want to open the circle of concern to everything sentient.  With all your hearts, you want us humans to be meant for cellulose or seeds or berries or anything that you believe can’t feel pain.  And I’m telling you the truth: it doesn’t work.  What you are made of — bones, blood, brain, heart — needs animals.  This is not the universe you wanted.  But it’s the way the world, always alive and always hungry, works.  You can try to live on those other things — the cellulose you can’t digest, the seeds that fight back, the berries and their sugar.  If you’re like me, you’ll do it until you’re half dead.  If you’re smarter than me, you’ll learn.  You want to open that circle, but in fact there’s no way out of it. We’re all of us, seeded and feathered, rooted and furred, already in it.   (p. 243)

Despite her empathy, Keith is still ruthless in her exploration of modern thinking on food.  She tackles, chapter by chapter, all the reasons that one might have for being a vegetarian or vegan: moral, political, nutritional.  She turns the writing of food scholars like Peter Singer, Frances Moore Lappe and Jim Merkel on its head, calling out the flaws in the thinking and research that is so often held up to support commonly held viewpoints around veg*n lifestyles.  She does make extensive use of other recently trending writings by authors like Michael Pollan, whose books The Omnivore’s Dilema, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food provide a great conceptual framework for Keith’s particular messages.

Of course, the question that naturally arises when one encounters material “attacking” a given approach to make the world a better place is “well, what does she suggest we do instead?”  It’s important to note that Keith is not at all suggesting we stand down from the calls issued by the veg*n communities and many other kinds of concerned citizens about stopping the horrors of CAFOs and industrial agriculture, and the book is not just a permission slip to eat meat without consideration of how it came to be dead on your plate.  To the contrary, she asserts that she wants an even more full accounting of our thinking about food production and the values, morals and assumptions that are behind it – an accounting that goes beyond turning to soy, or raw foodism, or other kinds of well-intentioned alternatives to a carnivorous diet.  As she notes in her concluding chapter, Keith doesn’t just want an alternative to mainstream thinking on food, she wants us to build a new approach that is self-consciously opposed to the dominator culture that fuels that thinking.

Despite my request above to avoid trying to summarize Keith’s work, I will provide a few of the questions she suggest you ask in considering what you eat (p. 248):

1. Does this food build or destroy topsoil?
2. Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers?
3. Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?

She also offers three strong recommendations for those interested in personal solutions:

1. Refrain from having children
2. Stop driving a car
3. Grow your own food

(I list these here in hopes that they make you want to understand more about why those questions and recommendations are relevant; again, please don’t take them out of the context of the larger book, or ask me to defend them here.)

If I can offer any criticism of The Vegetarian Myth at all, it’s that the book is so dense with information, and Keith often takes such a significant amount of time to make a point from multiple perspectives and with multiple supporting arguments, facts, etc. that it almost becomes overwhelming.  I fully understand the necessity of this approach given the resistance her arguments are sure to encounter, but it makes the book unsuitable as a starting point or introduction to these issues for someone who is not already exploring them in some form, or for whom there isn’t already some deep cracks in their own previously solid thinking about their veg*n lifestyle.  (In fact, I’m sure many vegetarians and vegans will be insulted by her statements and find her condescending, despite her great care to note, “hey, I was just like you once.”)  I don’t think Keith intends the book as said introduction, so maybe that’s just a fair warning to readers of this review, instead of anything wrong with her text.  But, at the risk of over-simplifying what is definitely not a simple topic, perhaps a future project could include a version of Keith’s book that can get the core assertions and arguments across in a shorter form, with pointers back to the full book and related resources for those wanting to know more.

For me personally, The Vegetarian Myth was a great unpacking of a phrase that I heard Daniel Quinn use many years ago to describe the practice of those who choose not to eat meat: “Kingdomism.”  In other words, discriminating against one kingdom of beings in the taxonomy of life in favor of another.  Lierre Keith does an excellent job of making the case that by practicing such discrimination, we deprive ourselves of and disconnect ourselves from the cycles of life in which we were designed to participate.  Some of the ideas were not new to me, but I’m still figuring out what this means for my own diet and food politics, as it was just this past January that I started trying to eat less meat, a project that has withered as I’ve turned the pages of this book.  And as with every experience that transforms our thinking, I’m left somewhat disoriented and full of questions, but also set on a new and exciting path of exploration and challenge.  As Keith kindly inscribed in my copy of The Vegetarian Myth, “First the Fight and then the Feast.”

(I linked to the Amazon.com product page for the book above, but if you buy it from Lierre Keith directly, she gets the most compensation, and you have the opportunity for a personalized inscription too!  If you’re in Richmond, you’re welcome to borrow my copy.  You can read the first 14 pages of the book online.)

Updated, from the comments: I should add that I find this book important and useful because of the important questions it raises and the challenges it offers, not because I can personally endorse every conclusion made. By no means have I followed all the primary research, and there are certainly people out there who offer the possibility that much of it is incorrect or misleading.  -Chris

Updated 8/3: In a private e-mail exchange after this review appeared, Keith noted that “many reviewers are focusing on my suggested personal actions, when I tried to be so clear that there are NO personal solutions. What we need is a serious political resistance movement–that’s the *only* solution. We need huge institutional change, and have been sold a useless bill of goods by both corporate America and liberalism as to the efficacy of personal consumer and lifestyle choices.“

It’s at 3:30 PM at Ivy Tech Community College, 3421 Johnson Hall – I hope you can join us.

In case you won’t be able to attend, here’s a list of 12 reasons that it’s a good idea to support the production and consumption of locally grown food (adopted from a list produced by The Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association):

1. Freshness – Locally-grown organic fruits and vegetables are usually harvested within 24 hours of being purchased by the consumer. Produce from California can’t be that fresh.
2. Taste – Produce picked and eaten at the height of freshness tastes better.
3. Nutrition – Nutritional value declines, often dramatically, as time passes after harvest. Because locally-grown produce is freshest, it is more nutritionally complete.
4. Purity – Eighty percent of American adults say they are concerned about the safety of the food they eat. They worry about residues of pesticides and fungicides. These materials are not permitted in an organic production system either before or after harvest.
5. Regional Economic Health – Buying locally grown food keeps money within the community. This contributes to the health of all sectors of the local economy, increasing the local quality of life.
6. Variety – Organic farmers selling locally are not limited to the few varieties that are bred for long distance shipping, high yields, and shelf life. Often they raise and sell wonderful unusual varieties you will never find on supermarket shelves.
7. Soil Stewardship – Soil health is essential for the survival of our species. Conventional farming practices are rapidly depleting topsoil fertility. Creating and sustaining soil fertility is the major objective for organic growers.
8. Energy Conservation – Buying locally grown organic foods decreases dependence on petroleum, a non- renewable energy source. One fifth of all petroleum now used in the United States is used in Agriculture. Organic production systems do not rely upon the input of petroleum derived fertilizers and pesticides and thus save energy at the farm. Buying from local producers conserves additional energy at the distribution level.
9. Environmental Protection – Soil erosion; pesticide contamination of soil, air, and water; nitrate loading of waterways and wells; and elimination of planetary biodiversity are some of the problems associated with today’s predominate farming methods. Organic growers use practices that protect soil, air, and water resources; and that promote biodiversity.
10. Cost – Conventional food processes don’t reflect the hidden costs of the environmental, health and social consequences of predominate production practices- of, for instance, correcting a water supply polluted by agricultural runoff, or obtaining medical treatment for pesticide induced illness suffered by farmers or consumers. When these and other hidden costs are taken into account, as they should be, locally grown organic foods are seen clearly for the value they are, even if they cost a few pennies more.
11. A Step Toward Regional Food Self Reliance – Dependency on far away food sources leaves a region vulnerable to supply disruptions, and removes any real accountability of producer to consumer. It also tends to promote larger, less diversified farms that hurt both the environment and local economies/communities. Regional food production systems, on the other hand, keep the food supply in the hands of many, providing interesting job and self-employment opportunities, and enabling people to influence how their food is grown.
12. Passing on the Stewardship Ethic – When you buy locally produced organic food you cannot help but raise the consciousness of your friends and family about how food buying decisions can make a difference in your life and the life of your community; and about how this basic act is connected to planetary issues.

What might an improved attentiveness to local food consumption look like in your community?

For now I’ll skip over last year’s resolution – which failed miserably – and bring you to my 2009 resolution, which is to eat less meat. Specifically, I’m trying to eat meat at no more than two meals per week. This is a revised plan of attack from past attempts to try an all-vegetarian diet, which I eventually decided wasn’t tenable for me.

Without getting too far into the food ethics involved in meat-eating (which are nonetheless important and deserving of further treatment), I thought I’d note why I’m doing this, and how it’s going so far:

I’m eating less meat because:

1. There are myriad statistics and resources showing that eating less factory-farmed meat is a good thing for my body, and for reducing the harm I cause to the planet and the life on it. Since most of the meat I have convenient access to is factory-farmed, I should eat less of it until I can change that reality.
2. I don’t want to give up all meat. I don’t want to practice “kingdomism,” and I recognize that having some meat as a part of my diet is important to me for a variety of reasons. I also didn’t want to take an approach that puts friends and family in an uncomfortable position when they’re cooking for me, or that precludes me from eating meat that was brought to the table in an ethical, humane way. (I fully realize that there are plenty who say there is no way to humanely eat the meat of other beings, or that the discomfort of the cook is far outweighed by the discomfort of the animal being eaten.)

How’s it going after a month? Well, mostly so far so good, but definitely with some complexities:

• Handling leftovers remains an interesting point of debate. If I eat at a restaurant and have meat at a meal there, and end up having leftovers, does it “count” as one of my two meals to eat those leftovers the next day? I think it’s mostly about intent – if I make a batch of meat-filled lasagna that lasts me all week, that’s definitely a major violation, but if I happen to have some leftovers, it seems within the spirit of the resolution to give myself some leeway, right?
• Despite eating almost no meat at home, I’m still not conditioned to hone in on the meatless dishes in some settings. I was at a catered event last week where I got a bowl of soup that looked vegetarian, and only found after I was eating it that it had meat in it…should’ve asked. At a Chinese buffet I found myself mindlessly putting a dish with meat in it on my plate as I’d done in the past, even though I’d fully intended to not eat meat there. So there’s definitely some mental adjusting still to be done, all worthwhile I’m sure.
• Vegetarians everywhere will roll their eyes at how obvious this is, but of course the whole experience is reminding me how hard it is to go against any given cultural norm when you’re in the minority, e.g. trying to avoid meat in a town that has more steakhouses than grocery stores, and where saying you’re vegetarian still prompts the question, “but you eat chicken, right?“

To be clear, I’m not at all prescribing vegetarianism or any particular diet as the right or wrong thing for anyone else, I’m just talking about what’s right for me.

As Jim C. noted two years ago, I have to be careful of “quitter’s righteousness” here, and not let a month of relative success go to my head. That’s partly why I’m blogging about it – if you dine with me or see me on the street, feel free to ask “how’s that meat twice a week thing going?”  I will hopefully give you the thumbs up sign, but I also might pretend I didn’t hear you and avoid eye contact.

If anything, this resolution is helping me to balance an increased attentiveness to what I eat (and the health/environment/social implications of that) with a desire to remain a little more flexible than quitting cold-tofurkey, and to try a personal change of habit that’s not so dramatic I can’t sustain it.

I’ll keep you posted.

Hefland takes us on her very personal journey through discoveries about the surprisingly harmful aspects of vinyl products at every step along their existence – from production to household use to incineration – and how they seem to be creating unnecessary and quite serious health risks around the world. The film plays out like many other documentaries about such things, and it could just as easily be about tobacco usage, asbestos, and similar prodcuts: coverups about just what the producers knew about the potential dangers and when, how the items have become part of the mainstream because of their convenience and popular appeal, a growing movement of people educating themselves and their communities about the dangers, and the massive resistance by corporations and governments to institute change. But Hefland does make the whole issue very approachable – every step of the way is tied back to her parents` decision to replace the wood siding on their house with vinyl siding, and what that means for the family home and their opinions of vinyl as she shares her findings. The result is a powerful documentary that challenges and often shocks, and through its combination of sad stories and hopeful alternatives, makes for a really great movie watching experience.

The intimacy in Hefland’s narrative doesn’t stop with the stories of her parents decision-making, however. You can see her abilities and confidence as a documentary filmmaker evolve right before your eyes as the movie progresses, and it was this aspect of the film that impressed me most. She starts out with the almost entirely aesthetic issue of why her parents would bother to replace their siding at all, and ends up tracking down lawyers all over the country, negotiating tense interviews with vinyl industry spokespeople, traveling the world to witness the actions other countries are taking against vinyl executives, and learning to ask the right questions at the right moment. All of this seems to be inspired by her own experience with ovarian cancer, caused by DES (a synthetic estrogen and anti-miscarriage drug prescribed to her mother and millions of other women)…she draws on the concerns and lessons of that encounter with a dangerous product thought safe, and tries to do a good thing with a similar product that is still largely thought harmless by the public. Indeed, the very funding for the film seems to come in large part from her settlement with the makers of DES, and it’s a form of poetic justice that she has done such amazing things with those resources.

Blue Vinyl is, at some level, just another film about the messed up way that we humans seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot with our approach to the products we develop and consume and the culture that drives those processes. These films seem to come out all the time now, and it’s hard to find any particular beauty in one given the bad news that they bear. But at the same time, the film is a warm and engaging story that stands out as an excellent piece of documentary filmmaking, with a message that, despite its familiarity, is as important and relevant as ever.

I caught her mention of aspartame as a common one and started doing a little research. While I tend to avoid looking up medical information on the Internet after previously embarrassing experiences doing so, I found lots of connections mentioned between headaches and aspartame. Who would have thought that ingesting formaldehyde would have negative health effects? Huh! Thanks, Monsanto! I took a brief skim of my pantry and found three products at the front of the shelf with aspartame and related substances like sucralose / Splenda, listed as an ingredient, both of which I’ve consumed lately – they’re now in the trash. Yeah, I know – we can’t just start throwing away everything that’s bad for us to any degree. But I figure that if a given edible substance has to have dueling propaganda websites and panels of experts to talk about whether or not it REALLY causes brain tumors, I can probably live without it to be on the safe side.

Perhaps I can ONLY live without it.

But I am glad that there are enough problems with the Social Security system that the level of public debate about how to “fix” it is increasing.

I think the concept of social security is a sound one. Who wants to think about the prospect of growing old and not being cared for, not being able to meet basic needs? Most humans cultures have some sort of basic tradition that says the elderly members of its society should be cared for, even if those members aren’t themselves able to contribute any longer to the health of that society.

The U.S. Government’s Social Security program is derived, I think, from this natural instinct to protect and care for those citizens. The problem is that by centering our notion of security around the promise that we’ll get a certain amount of money from the government every month when we need it, we have effectively distanced ourselves from what it really means to be cared for and secure in old age. I would also suggest that, in doing so, we have reinforced a significant negative theme of modern civilization: that dependency on each other for happiness, community, care and protection is no longer necessary, as long as we can work hard enough to “earn” our own security, as long as the government is around to provide for us. When we move away from security that involves dependency on family, neighbors, friends, we become more isolated, more subject to to forces beyond our control, more afraid of the risks of stepping out to find something better.

It should tell us something that the politicians and lobbyists are fighting over what kind of a program to put in place to fix another program that other politicians and lobbyists put into place. The stacks of band-aids upon band-aids does not give me much faith that there will be any real “security” around by the time I get there. Indeed, I already see the members of generations that have come before me finding that the promises made to them have been revised, reduced and broken. But I’m fairly certain that no one in any power is thinking “how can we REALLY fix this system forever” – that might actually generate some innovation. It’s all about holding things together until the last possible minute.

What’s the solution, then? What would I do with Social Security? (I’m so honored that you would ask!) The answer isn’t simple, but I can tell you that it does not involve repairing the system we have now. It does not include perpetuating the myth that artificial political and governmental structures can effectively and justly address the needs of every citizen crossing over into retirement.

It does involve trusting that people with enlightened self-interest can make a better use of the money that comes out of their paycheck every month than bureaucrats in Washington can. It does involve re-thinking the way our culture and our government deal with concepts of earning a wage, growing old, and creating and maintaining sustainable communities and cultures. It does involve allowing those natural human instincts to care for our neighbors and loved ones kick in. It does involve pursuing a much truer kind of social security than any piece of paper can offer.

I hope that the current debate will bring some to have a similar sense that “there must be a better way.”

It always seemed odd to me that Ten minutes of life would mean more than the life lost, but the wistful stare in Eppie’s eyes when we talked about it brought me closer to understanding. You see, in those last Ten minutes of her father’s life, she realized that her father was dying. According to her (and sometimes her mother), their eyes met as this sunk in at about minute number Three and that was when he realized it too. One of the nurses reflected later that in that moment, even though all the damn machines were going off and people were waving goodbye in their hearts, he felt like the cancer “just up and left” Eppie’s father and that “if we hadn’t all been so intent on him dying he might have up and walked away from the whole mess.” But with Seven minutes to go, what are you gonna do, especially if you don’t know you have even that much?

Cry is what Eppie wanted to do, but her father wouldn’t have it. He was mostly gone and mostly ready, but he wasn’t just about to slip out. The damnedest thing is that every power involved seemed raring for him to do just that, but right as minute Four started to head into its second half, he sat up in bed and held out his hands.

The real excitement wasn’t that he was sitting up, though this was apparently something he hadn’t done since he woke from the last round of miserable skin slashing and marrow moving, but the real excitement came when he held out his right hand as if it were a flat slate and with his left made a scribbling motion. Now it seems his hands were pretty weak so I guess the motion wasn’t that clear to Eppie at the time, so it took until about minute Five and forty-five seconds until she realized that her father, who had lived 43 years of life and who had devoted 12 of them to her happiness, was trying to get a message across. And this time, it wasn’t the “need more water” or the “change the channel” signing he would have to make because there were so many awful tubes in his beautiful mouth; no, this time it was something that gave him enough strength to hoist his tired and dying body closer to his daughter. This time it was a message that made nothing else matter.

Eppie never got that message. No one in that room did. The very thought of the situation makes me want to cry, and I can’t really even begin to imagine what it does to my friend. When minute Six reared its head, Eppie shouted for a paper and pen and her mom followed Seconds later with a cry for the same. The one time when Eppie went into a lot of detail about it, she said “the damn hospital kept the place so clean and reality-free that there wasn’t a writing utensil or paper to be found in the room.” But it got worse. The nurse who felt the cancer leave walked out looking for something to write on as minute Seven walked in. Eppie’s father looked around questioningly and his hand stopped scribbling. He just sat there, she said. “Just sat there and waited for something to write on. My dad had been waiting to die for six months and now all he had to wait for was a pen and some paper.”

The nurse had to go far to get it. He had to watch the head nurse fumble around the admit desk for something suitable for a patient to use. He had to watch the head nurse scribble ink on a piece of scratch paper to make sure the pen worked. He could not say anything because it was almost minute Eight and that ink “might as well have been life flowing out of that poor man’s body.”

Eight and a half and his head started to droop. Eight and forty and his head hit the pillow. Just a few before Nine and his hands fell all the way down by his side. Nine-oh-five and Eppie grabbed both of them. Nine ten and his squinting eyes were for ced closed by the rising smile that defied a tube that gave him breath. Nine thirty and there was so little movement and so many tears. Minute Ten rolled around and the message left forever like a secret that is so secret you forget about it. After that, Eppie’s life was only ever measured in hours and days and tears, but never in such minutes and seconds as those.

We won’t always be able to figure out that dad wants to write us a message. The damn hospital isn’t always going to have some paper and a pen lying around. There isn’t always going to be a nurse, and if there is, he isn’t always going to care about your dad. Sometimes, what we do in minute number Two matters so much more than what happens in minute number Nine. This is a happy story. These are the greatest Ten minutes of your life.