March, 2009 - Julie Clawson

So we are one week into Lent. I posted on Ash Wednesday about my ambivalence regarding how to observe the season this year. At this point in my life, I feel the need to build up faith instead of eliminate random habits in the name of discipline. But I really didn’t know how to do that. I finally decided to spend the season simply being more aware.

Now of course being aware could just be a euphemism for doing nothing – and it just well might be. It’s easy sometimes to open our eyes to the world around us and then fail to act upon what we see. That’s me most of the time these days. But when I’m at the point that my main goal some days is just to make it to the end of the day without having gone utterly insane from being trapped inside the house with screaming children – to open my eyes and get past my self-absorption seems like a good place to start.

So being aware…

Here’s where I show how really pathetic I am. I’ve been reading through the Lenten Guide provided by Mustard Seed Associates. It is a fantastic resource, full of faith and community building suggestions for the season. I was drawn to the meditation they had on Psalm 51:10 “Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.” It resonated with my desire to be more aware of my world and get over myself. And it’s a way more spiritual of a prayer than “God help me not be a selfish bitch.” But part of the Lenten Guide is a suggestion to take the Mutunga $2 Challenge. The idea is for a family to commit for a week to eating on $2 per person per day. Since most of the world only makes $2 a day, this is an exercise to help foster awareness as to how most of the world lives. If anything, it serves to highlight how much we truly do have. I think it’s a great idea, but (and here’s the pathetic part) I’m not doing it. But in a strange way that too has helped me be more aware.

When I first heard about the challenge, I mentally started adding up the cost of what it takes to feed Aidan each day. At 8 months his diet is rather fixed and I quickly realized that there is no way that I could feed him on $2 a day. That shocked me since I already try to be economical with his food. His diet consists of breast milk, formula, oatmeal, and pureed fruits and veggies. So the breast milk is free and if I was a bit more diligent about using the (expensive) breast pump I have then perhaps I wouldn’t need the formula. But the reality is that he gets formula in his oatmeal and generally one bottle a day. I’m already over a dollar there. Granted I use organic formula – the stuff that doesn’t contain hormones, steroids, and melamine. Perhaps I could save a few cents by feeding him those poisons, but really? On top of that I make all of his pureed food. I save a ton of money (and disposable jars) doing that, but even 8-10 oz a day adds up fast (between $1-2 a day). But if I were buying the jar food, that same amount of food would cost between $2-5 a day.

But as I thought through that I was reminded that it is generally the poorer mothers who are forced to buy the more expensive foods. For a lot of women because of job circumstances using expensive formula is the only option. And finding time to make babyfood is hard – it’s a lot easier for busy moms to just buy jars off the shelf. Even ignoring what is healthiest for the baby or what is most environmentally friendly – the bottom line is that it costs more to get by when you’re stressed out trying to make ends meet. So I have to ask – what causes this? Is it culture? All the other moms use formula, so it seems like the only option. Marketing? All those free formula samples supplied to hospitals and doctors making their mark. Lack of education? Do women not know the cost difference and health benefits? Or simply systemic injustices that prevent poor mothers from fully focusing on their family. This is not just about the poor in third world countries struggling on $2 a day – but its about minimum wage single moms here that are caught in a system that holds them back. When those that can least afford it have to spend the most on food there are cultural issues that seriously need addressed.

What am I doing about that? I don’t know. Yet. But I know it helps to be aware.

In conversations about how times have changed and the progress the world has made one inevitably hears the flat earth scenario. You know, the whole “once upon a time people were so deluded by faith that they actually believed the world was flat.” Whether that is a cultural myth or not doesn’t matter. What’s at stake here is the sociological ability to admit mistakes on the historical level.

It’s something that amuses me. For as hard some choose to believe that certain formulations of history are the gospel truth so to speak (i.e. that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the 1950’s were a more moral time…), alternative interpretations of the facts still exist. But it takes a lot for a culture to let go of one collective interpretation in favor of another. Granted, major shifts, like deciding slavery is wrong or that women are people too, are rare. But even the small stuff fascinates me.

I was reminded of these shifts a couple of times recently. The first was after hearing about a recent report on NPR. The report basically was about how science sometimes gets it wrong. It discussed how when around 1900 doctors began autopsies on SIDS victims (babies), they identified the thymus glands as being enlarged. Thinking a cure for SIDS simply involved shrinking the gland, tens of thousands of babies were given radiation treatments to shrink their thymus. Unfortunately this was a misdiagnosis based on faulty anatomy research. Early anatomical research was done on cadavers collected from poor houses. The thymus gland is interesting in that it shrinks when a person is under high levels of stress – such as experiencing abject poverty. So, when the anatomy books were first written they identified the thymus as much smaller than a healthy one should be. The babies in fact had healthy thymus glands. The sad outcome of the mistake is that some 30,000 of these babies later died from radiation induced throat cancer. A costly mistake, but at one point the facts and the research had seemed so sure…

Similarly I recently discovered that absinthe is now legal in the United States. This surprised me – I’ve seen Moulin Rouge and the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. I’ve heard the stories that this liquor is more hallucinogenic drug than alcohol – perhaps laced with opium or something equally addictive and life destroying. Why else would it be banned in almost every country in the world? But as those bans have been overturned worldwide recently, it’s become known that absinthe’s bad reputation was based solely on cultural myth. Early tests linked the herbs in absinthe to the same chemicals as in LSD, but those were proven false. In fact there is no evidence that Absinthe is in truth anything more than a really strong drink. Sure it is addictive – back in the 19th century this herbal distilled liquor had a high alcohol content but mixed with sugar and tasting of licorice was extremely drinkable. It was the fruity girly drink of its day – making it a bit too easy to have a few too many. Sure dripping sugar slowly into it produced a chemical reaction that turned the liquid green (releasing the green fairy), but it was basically alcohol pure and simple. And for nearly a century the world believed that something this easy to drink had to contain sinister drugs and kept up the bans. It took some hard lobbying with the truth for the U.S. government to finally admit in 2007 that they were wrong and allow the green fairy across our borders.

There’s nothing extremely significant or deeply meaningful about either of these stories beyond the cultural ability to shift perspective and admit mistakes. They serve as a reminder to me to hold truth lightly. I can have faith and I can believe, but I need to take care not to cling so tightly with certainty to an idea that I am unable to admit I am wrong when need be. Our interpretations of the facts, the cultural myths we hold dear, the lenses though which we view the world all shift over time and if we truly do care about truth, we will be ready and willing when those shifts need to happen in our lives.

Month: March 2009

Admitting Historical Mistakes