Tag Archives: health

Look at that big hand

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by Cancer, Media • Tags: ,

The last time I watched “High Noon” was 60 years ago. And that’s a sentence that seems odd to write. But a dear friend kept telling me I should watch it again, that it had (unlike some other once popular films we discussed) stood up well to the passing of the years.

Not easy to get hold of, but I suddenly spotted it the other day on one of those cheap remainders tables in the DVD store and so here we are.

And indeed it has stood up well. But I don’t really want to discuss the craft that makes it, or should make it, somewhere up among the all time film classics. When I saw it 60 years ago I would have watched it as I did any other cowboy movie. Thought it a bit slow-moving perhaps, long time to get to the gunfight showdown which was the set piece of any cowboy movie. But then, bang, bang, bang, and bang, and it was the baddies who would be, of course, occupying the newly made coffins.

But now, a sadder man and wiser, with a lot more miles in the saddle, the gunfight is incidental, a necessary chore to get through, while the rest of the film is, astonishingly for a cowboy movie made in 1952, an extended metaphor worthy of, say, Bergman.

And a metaphor, what’s more, about life and death, something that I as a child knew nothing about, but now, with an almost near death experience or two under my gunbelt, can identify with instinctively.

Gary Cooper is everyman. Fate is coming for him down that ominous rail line stretching into the future. Something wicked that way comes, inexorably. Is it on time, yes it’s on time, is it on time, yes it’s on time. Oh, yes, it’s a cowboy movie, so the wicked thing is a gunslinger in real life, but imagine that it is cancer, say, or a diseased heart. The clock is ticking, this is the deadline, no escape.

Should everyman run from his fate? Well, he could, but he can’t hide, it will catch up with him (like an appointment in Samarra), all he can do is face it and either survive or not. Bravely facing your worst fear may be suicidal, but the alternative is worse. But wait, not to worry, he won’t be alone, he can face this with his own strength of character, all the character resources he has built up, his reserves of mental health and strength..

But then everything is stripped away from him, bit by bit, one by one. He is on his own, or, as Mrs Soprano said, “in the end we all die in our own arms alone”. And all the time the clock is ticking, the deadline fixed. Death is in the air and the coffins are being made, the hammering of coffin nails matching the ticking clock.

Finally the clock will strike twelve (though oddly it doesn’t audibly), and everyman is out on the street, alone. That long dusty street, the final stage of life’s journey heading towards the wickedness which has now arrived by rail and is covering the last little distance, potentially the last moment of life.

Finally the battle is on for his life. Face your demons, fight hard, bravely, win through against the odds, survive. Live to fight another day.

Or maybe that interpretation is biased by my own recent demons. What do you think? But if you haven’t seen it, or not since you were a child, take another look, this lean, pared down gem of a movie is a real classic. My friend was right.

Fiery particles

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by Cancer, Environment • Tags: , , , ,

So here I am again. Blogging, one-handed, in the oncology day treatment ward. For the last time. Ever.

No, mustn’t tempt the fates, waiting with their deadly scissors to punish both optimism and hubris. This is hopefully the last chemo treatment (astonishingly number 19) for quite a while after two years and 4 days since my first one, an age ago.

Side effects a bit rough last time, hope better this time.

This whole process is a bit like burning the forest to get rid of weeds and then seeing the good green shoots appearing again through the blackened landscape. Chemotherapy burns up all the white blood cells, including the bad lymphoma particles, and then the blood ecology comes back.

But just as the forest is damaged by each fire, and the more you burn, the less well the ecology recovers, so the more you “burn” the good cells in the body the more you damage them, and the less your body returns to normal. Moderation in both are needed.

There, managed to combine my fire research with my cancer treatment, not a bad metaphor eh?

So don’t forget to vote for me as Best Blog at http://www.writerscentre.com.au/bloggingcomp/peopleschoice.html – page 5 under THE Watermelon Blog.

Tilting at markets

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by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , ,

Once upon a time I thought that Steve Jobs was an IT saint, put down on Earth for a little while to enrich the lives of ordinary mortals, and Bill Gates, well, wasn’t. Recent years have tended to almost, though not quite, reverse those judgements, though you would still have to pry my iPad and MacPro from my cold dead hands, and I have never bought a computer that uses Windows.

Still, Bill, and Melinda, Gates, having gained wealth beyond the dreams of anyone except Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and Australian mining magnates, have been heaven bent (unlike Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and Australian mining magnates) on putting their riches to good use. And good for them.

And good for Bill, on the basis of what he has learnt in his post-capitalist life, getting stuck into capitalism, “ripping it a new one”, as I would say if I was one of them trendy bloggers.

He pointed out:
“The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need, but it gets virtually no funding. If you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria.”

While this example relates to a particular interest of Bill Gates, it obviously applies more generally. That is, you can’t rely on “capitalism” to provide any kind of services to a community because it will always focus on the profitable bits and ignore the unprofitable ones. Poor people, and poor regions, will always miss out, an observation that in itself makes nonsense of the libertarian free market neoconservative think tank demands to privatise everything up to the air we breathe.

But Bill’s observations, while absolutely correct and damning, are at the same time just a tad ironic.

One of the demands of conservatives of course is that we get rid of all social services, public support mechanisms, because the super rich, getting ever richer under neoconservative governments, will let a little largesse trickle down from the high table to the poor. Just as, once upon a time, king and nobles might allow the poor to fight over food scraps from their table, or over a handful of pennies scattered on the ground, or allow, graciously, hems of robes to be touched in a free medical service.

The irony is that even a benevolent billionaire like Gates, offering not robe touching but malaria treatments to the poor, is still working to the capitalist model. Not “The Market” but Bill’s own interests and inclinations decide what he will support and fund. Absolutely fair enough, it’s his money that we (well, not me, but you see what I mean) gave him, and he can spend it as he pleases.

But what pleases him is no more serving the whole community in the most effective way than the drug companies who put their mouths where the money is. What we need you see, is a system where the people of a country would elect some of their number to represent their interests. And that number would investigate the needs of the country, its people, and set priorities accordingly. Then there could be a mechanism whereby each citizen, and corporation, according to their ability, contributed a proportion of their wealth to a fund which would be used to pay for those priorities.

If only we were smart enough to invent something we could call, oh, I don’t know, “democracy”. Then we could get things like Malaria funded properly, and not at the whim of capitalists and capitalism, and capitalism could pretend to deal with hair loss.

Like a circle in a spiral

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by Cancer • Tags: ,

Just to get you up to date with progress. My last chemo cycle was before Xmas. Should have had the next one about two weeks ago, but the oncologist couldn’t decide whether another condition I developed about a year ago was related to the Lymphoma and or would be exacerbated by the chemotherapy. So she trotted me off last week for more tests and the excitement of yet another different medical waiting room (this one with walls covered in cricket memorabilia and photos). The new specialist (not much older, it seemed, than someone who could be my grandson) decided that while my very advanced years were indeed contributing to whatever had triggered this problem last year, neither the lymphoma nor the chemotherapy were. However, unless it dramatically worsened, he didn’t want to treat the condition with a minor operation until my chemotherapy course was complete later in the year.

So, good news bad news, no additional medical mucking around, but on the other hand fit for chemotherapy. Felt like a young British or Commonwealth man in 1914 assessed as being fit and healthy enough to go off to the trenches in France and be shot at. The cycles resume early Monday morning, back to the three weekly cycles for some indeterminate period (although given that the first two seem to have been effective to at least some extent, as well as turning me into a totally bald person and some other nasty side effects, I’m hoping it won’t be more than about 5 months).

And there you have it, back to where it all began nearly 2 years ago. As if I have been cycling away, beating Lance Armstrong, only to discover I was on an exercise cycle and had gone precisely nowhere. As does Lance I suppose.

Time to grin and bear it, bit of a laugh ha ha ha, One day at a time, not thinking about the triumphant ride up the Champs Elysees in July, nor the triumphant wave to the oncology nurses in June.

Come along for the ride with me, once again.

A, B, C, D… E, F, G…

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by Education, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Anyway, that’s another round of chemotherapy almost completed. Neither I nor my Oncologist sure whether the first round achieved much (but had left my Neutrophils worryingly low for the start of a new cycle, so I have to have a new injection this afternoon to deal with that), but we will review again in three weeks. Some unpleasant, and mysterious, body problems this week reminded me yet again that from the moment of first being diagnosed with cancer your mindset changes. You go from being comfortable in your own skin, to being uncomfortable. And you go from happily assuming that any health problems you have are readily explainable, treatable, and short-lived, to being able to assume nothing. Your body goes from being a Known Known to one full of Unknown Unknowns. Simple views about your personal health universe rapidly give way to complex ones.

You are caught, as I said to the Oncologist this week, in the world of the Three S’s. Anything you experience could be a Symptom (of the cancer itself), a Side Effect (of the cancer treatment), or Something Else (totally unrelated to either). Life, they say, wasn’t meant to be easy. Nor, in the case of cancer treatment, is there such a thing as a free lunch, everything comes at a cost.

Anyway, all this reminded me, eating my free lunch of soggy sandwiches in the Oncology chair, machine beeping and dripping (slowly, slowly) on my right, of the debate about education this week in Australia.

The country, in some survey, had apparently ranked way down the list, 25th in this, 26th in that, 27th in the other. Our children were apparently as poorly educated as those of poorly educated countries – couldn’t be misunderestimated, we were misundereducated.

Within moments of the survey appearing on the airwaves and interwebs, as if the barriers had been opened in the Melbourne Cup, those same airwaves and interweb tubes were full of answers from experts and anyone with an opinion (to the extent that they can be considered separate categories). It was the Labor government’s fault, teacher’s fault, a funding problem, lack of attention to the three R’s, not enough rote learning, the result of education not being the same as when the opinionator was educated, school autonomy, phonics, testing programs, private schooling, and so on.

Trouble was, every Opinionperson thought the right answer was THEIR answer. That if there was a problem in education then it was the result of a single cause and had a single solution. Sadly this is the kind of simplemindedness that has resulted in many educational dead ends. When we ask the rarely asked question “is our children learning?”, just like the question “why is my stomach sore?”, we need to be aware that there are no simple answers.

Let’s start at the beginning this time with the actual survey. It was conducted in 2010, a fact that escaped media attention, so that the answer “it’s all the Labor government’s fault” didn’t really ring true. There was no consideration of how the comparisons were made, nor whether they allowed for cultural and socio-economic differences (in just the way you need to with “IQ tests”) between different countries. Nor was any thought given to desirability of high rankings. If a country was doing well because (say) of rote learning of the Three R’s, and rigid discipline in class rooms, is this really the way you want Australia to go?

But even taking the rankings at face value, concentrating on one particular aspect of what goes on in the classroom is begging for a misdiagnosis. As well as the Three R’s we also need to know whether a particular child, or group of children, falling behind in something is the result of a symptom, a side effect, or something else entirely.

Much has changed in Australia since I was a child (to start at a very remote time indeed), all affecting education in some way.

To name just a few relevant factors: The structure of suburbs and travel, play, and social opportunities for children are different; children are exposed to television and radio for hours each day as a primary source of entertainment, knowledge, and values; the values expressed in reality tv and quiz shows, for example, are much changed from my values; children are using computers in various forms for communication, games, learning; diets are much inferior to what they were; right-wing populist politicians and religious leaders have launched an attack on science and education in recent years; and on teachers themselves; and on curricula, with demands for including nonsense like creationism; money has been moved from public schools into private and fundamentalist religious schools; underfunding of preschool and kindergarten and loss of trained staff reduces the early educational possibilities; both parents working reduces the opportunities for learning at home; few homes these days seem to have books or encourage reading; peer pressure tends to put more value on the lowest common denominator of intellectual achievement; teacher are faced with larger class sizes, while at the same time having more bureaucracy to deal with, and demands that they teach more and more topics (driving cars for example, or coping with social media) that someone thinks is important; older teachers are retiring while younger ones have come through much the same social and cultural and educational milieu as their students; “National testing” has put emphasis on “learning for the test”, because schools that don’t do well in it will lose funding and students; some educator will come up with some mad-brained scheme like “phonics” and have some politician impose it on schools …

Enough, you get the idea, and I’m sure you could all add many more. And remember, before you can compare results for different countries, and come up with solutions, you would somehow, have to allow for all those variables being different between the countries.

Look, there is no doubt that Australian education would be a lot better if it followed the model of Finland, always top of these kinds of surveys, rather than America. Put more money into public education (and preschools), value teachers and education, try to get more education support in the home, and so on. But really, to make any improvements in educational performance we also have to seek changes to the way families and society are performing, to look at our media, and our social, cultural, political values, not just the Three R’s.

Easy, eh? Now, if you could just tell me why I have this ache in my shoulder, Doc…

A world too wide

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by Cancer • Tags: , , ,

You know those cartoons where the pursuing villain suddenly has a car fall from the sky and land on him? Or a big boulder, or a tree. Kersplat!

That’s old age. There you are tootling along, minding your own, and others, business, clear path, distant horizons beckoning, not, as has been the case, a physical care in the world, when Whammo!

The future was always another country. Some distant, unfamiliar country that other people lived in. Needed a passport, I thought, to get through Customs, cross the border. Not so.

Always used to being the youngest in any room. Suddenly the lights went off and when they came back on, hey, who is this old fellow in the corner? No gradual process, no time to get used to the idea, adjust, practise being old, just Kaboom.

Past is another country? Nah, past is same-old same-old, been there done that. Wearing a younger man’s clothes, sure, but you’d recognise him in the street, compare notes, have a chat about shared experiences. But the fellow wearing the older man’s clothes? Would you recognise him even? And what would you talk about? Sickness? Hospitals? Infirmities? Loss? Disappointments? Failures? You, young fellow, haven’t experienced those, have nothing to contribute, have no more to say than if confronted by an old fellow who had fought in wars, experienced the Great Depression, lived through plagues, droughts.

And yet, suddenly, there you are, in a pub, at a party, and you are the old fellow holding forth to the young folks whose eyes are already glazing over. They have no idea of old age, also hanging over them like Vesuvius over Pompeii in 79 AD.

Shakespeare knew all about it, heard the volcano rumbling, though it rumbled not for him, dead at the young age of 52. He was just in his Fifth Age:
And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.

But he had watched others, and knew what came, after the triumphal but brief years of maturity, next:
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Well, ain’t that the truth? Go to bed one night with round belly and wise saws, wake up the next morning sans everything. Old Age comes as a shock to every generation. Need perhaps to pay some old people to chant, as you walk by, bouncing along, full of joie de vivre and bullet proof:
Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you will be,
Prepare for death and follow me.
No, not next week, you foolish man
Tomorrow, and you have no plan.

Or, more simply, a sign saying “Beware, large, old man troll ahead with big club”.

Unforgettable

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by Cancer • Tags: , , , , ,

Some years ago the Cancer Council of Australia ran an advertising campaign based on the phrase “Cancer: It’s a word not a sentence”. Clever in a sort of pretty unsubtle way of course, it was used to mark a change from the days when the only possible response to cancer was a kind of surgical blitzkrieg, the chances of success low, to those where new chemical and radiation treatments began to be introduced and refined, either to improve the success of surgical intervention, or as stand-alone procedures. Remission periods grew longer, outright cures became possible, so the Cancer Council was right to tell people not to despair that they were doomed when the doctor uttered that doom-laden C-word, but to be optimistic, to have hope the treatment could be worthwhile.

But, leaving behind the intended meaning of the slogan, that cancer is no longer, necessarily, a [Death] Sentence, the phrase is completely wrong. Cancer isn’t a word, it is a sentence. Unlike getting an injury, or breaking a bone, or catching an infection, for all of which there is treatment and cure, quickly over, something barely remembered a few years later, cancer is ongoing, unforgettable, a long sentence, a life sentence. And here it is:

Cancer is: having a series of increasingly unpleasant tests, waiting anxiously for the results, then watching as the oncologist’s face goes grim as he reads them; spending a day every couple of weeks hooked up to a bag of nasty chemicals by a sharp needle in your hand or arm; never feeling well for months at a time while treatment proceeds, and constantly feeling anxious that you will suddenly feel worse and have to be rushed off to hospital; spending your life moving from one doctor’s waiting room to the next, one testing facility to the next; suffering from a series of debilitating after-effects, conditions and diseases that your depleted immune system no longer copes with; worrying that every symptom you get, once dismissed as some minor ailment, might be the cancer returning; knowing that there are cancer cells always lurking somewhere in your body waiting to burst out and start a cellular revolution at any time; never really feeling well, and so reluctant to do once-normal activities; dealing with the concerns of family and friends.

Some sentence, eh?

Note – I have previously written about other aspects of my cancer experience here, here and here.

The Hucksters

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by Economics, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Parents, let us safely assume, have been always pretty much the same – concerned about children’s safety, learning, nutrition, clothing. So why the childhood obesity epidemic, and why suddenly, in 2012, in the view of shock jocks and food lobbyists, have parents stopped caring about, being responsible for, their children’s well-being, to the extent that they are to blame for this obesity?

What nonsense. Whenever you hear the words “Nanny State” and “personal responsibility” reach for a metaphorical gun. Here is the argument – parents have suddenly stopped being responsible for what their children eat, and their health status (not sure why, but there it is, inarguable fact), and must be bullied into being so again by shock jocks. Nothing else has changed in society so it is obviously the fault of parents, who must pull themselves together and once more accept their responsibility. Any suggestion of any other action would be “Nanny Statism” and none of us want that, do we (said somewhat menacingly).

But wait, what is wrong with this picture? Society has extensively changed in the way that food is produced, packaged and promoted. When I was growing up in the 1950s there were no fast food outlets. I’ll say that again, NO fast food outlets. There were no supermarkets. There was very little processed or packaged food. People bought, or grew, fresh ingredients, and made stuff.  Freshly made bread was delivered to the door each morning, as was freshly made milk.

Nor was there much advertising of food, though there was, of course, of cigarettes, what would have been the purpose? As a consequence, none of us copied each other in eating certain foods, nor nagged parents to get them. Food was, well, just food, and you ate it, of necessity, just like you drank water and breathed. Conversely, glamorous cigarettes, promising a world of maturity and sophistication, were massively taken up by young teens, imitating each other, and the cool cats in adverts and movies.

But about this time, as my teenage years succeeded each other, a change came over the food industry. Corporations realised that “supermarkets” could make far more money than the old corner grocery store (which had also, incidentally, because taken for granted as customer service, delivered to the door, in fact delivered to the kitchen table, groceries too heavy for customers like my grandmother to carry home). The supermarket would also send out of business the greengrocer, and end for ever home deliveries of fresh milk and bread.

At the same time, to make the supermarket work profitably, much of what was sold had to be processed, preserved, packaged, to make it last, to make it appealing, to make it a little addictive. Meanwhile, fast food makers of various kinds were realising that if they created a market for their product by making, for example, a certain kind of hamburger as appealing as, say, Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, huge profits were assured. Fast food, which also, uncoincidentally, required to be processed, preserved, packaged, and made addictive by the addition of salts and fats.

Convince people to buy food that was convenient for the corporations but bad for them, how could you do that?

Well, cometh the hour, cometh the adman. As early as 1957 Vance Packard (as was Frederic Wakeman  in fictional form in “The Hucksters” in  1946) was detailing the sophistication with which advertising was already operating, a world away from the simple informative ads before WW2. The psychology of human beings and how they could be made to respond, unwittingly, to colours, sounds, smells, shapes, shop placement, were all carefully studied and applied. Even subliminal advertising was tested.

In the last half century the sophistication of the psychological analysis in advertising. Whole teams of psychologists examine every detail of human perception and how to manipulate it. Every age and socio-economic group in society is individually targeted with finely tailored advertising. Down to children, where there is both big money, and future customers.

So everything is thrown at children, once and future customers. Every trick learnt over 50 years is beamed at them in advertising blitzkrieg. Not just colours, shapes, smells, sounds, shop placement (though the latter is particularly a science for children) but all sorts of extras.

Most important is to develop the most powerful force in children’s lives – peer pressure. Make something so apparently desirable that its ownership by one child will make it an imperative for others to own and you have a licence to print money. Add in the linkage of products to popular films or games, and make gifts available with, say, hamburgers, and you have a bigger licence. Ensure products made attractive by such methods are placed at children’s eye level in supermarkets and you multiply your sales even further.

So, half a century of development, tens of thousands of psychological researchers, designers, film makers, all aimed at making children both want and demand things from their parents which they must have or their lives will be ruined.

And yet, in the face of this highly sophisticated industry worth billions of dollars, individual parents are supposed to be able to resist the enormous pressures. Be “responsible”. No difference between parents caring for their children 50 years ago and now, but the big difference is the food and advertising industries and their effects.

But after all, reining in this advertising onslaught on children, and its disastrous effects on their weight and health, would be “Nanny State” right?

Just Disorderly

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by Uncategorized • Tags: , , ,

Sorry for lack of posts recently but has been a bad week in various ways, although ironically, and annoyingly, I have been pretty healthy really. But not feeling myself, one way and another, and that is an essential precondition of writing.

Have a whole lot of seedstock posts ready for germination but so far the seed is falling on barren ground (which reminds me, inevitably, as it will remind you, of Dorothy Parker’s pet bird who she named Onan). Will try to get my scattered seed, sorry, wits, together soon and get back into the Passing Parade. Which reminds me, and will remind one or two of my more senior readers, of yet another feature of times past, the picture theatre newsreel. This ran before the major film, and was the only chance we had, in those pre-tv days, of seeing actual moving talking images of, say Churchill, Eisenhower, Olympic Games, wars, and other events, albeit in Perth some days after the things happened, because it took a while to fly the films in (just as it would take, if the Sun blew up, 8 minutes for us to become aware of the explosion, in Perth if World War Three had begun in the 1950s we would not have known for several days that the world was over). So popular were these newsreels that there was a small theatre, the Mayfair, which ran only newsreels interspersed with short comedies, notably The Three Stooges (not inappropriately), on a continuous rotation. You could enter at any time, guided in the dark by an usher with a torch, and sit for an hour or so until the segment was on that you had first seen when you came in.

OK, now back to where we were when you first came in. Have been doing a very occasional twitter series about things that annoy me (yes, yes, it’s a long list) and I thought I would do a more extended one here that wouldn’t fit twitter.

Often when there is discussion about, say, a racist incident, where for example football fans scream racial abuse at a black player (as happened, once again, this week at the European Soccer championships); Or homophobia; Or misogyny up to and including violence against women; Or violence in the streets; Or criminal behaviour of some kind, the cry will go up from family, friends, lawyers, oh, he didn’t mean it, he is a really nice fellow, he was drunk. He was not himself, in short, because of Demon Drink.

Nonsense. I don’t do any of that stuff when I am drunk (I alternate between raucous, maudlin, and going to sleep on the sofa) and I don’t know anyone who does. Those who do are not behaving “out of character” but totally in character as the firewater releases inhibitions. You want an excuse for behaving badly? Alcohol isn’t it. Perhaps you could blame your parents?

To be hanged with the bible

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by Atheism, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When the bible was written humans* didn’t know:
About bacteria and viruses and parasites
Blood circulation
Earth going around sun
More than 5 planets
About galaxies
There was a southern hemisphere
Earth round
What lightning is
That whales aren’t fish
What mental illness involves
About genes and inheritance
About Chinese, Aztecs, Zulus, Aborigines, Navaho, Japanese, Papuans, Bushmen, Mayans, Eskimo, Indonesians, West Africans, Britons
Composition of matter
Any history
Composition of moon
About fossils
There was a western hemisphere
The age of the Earth
About the great apes
About continental drift
About kangaroos, lemurs, opossums, emus, iguanas, alpacas, platypus, kiwi, gila lizards, sloths, tree frogs, humming birds, horseshoe crabs, peripatus, tasmanian tigers, rhinoceros

When bible written humans had never:
Flown
Travelled faster than a horse can run
Communicated except by speaking directly
Elected a government
Swum under the ocean
Read books
Looked through a telescope
Looked through a microscope
Warmed themselves by anything except wood fires
Been cured by antibiotics
Had a surgical operation
Seen a hospital, school or factory
Seen a town of more than few thousand people

When bible written humans were happy about:
Slavery
Women as chattels
Divine kings
Child marriage
War
Destruction of environment
Gods living on mountains
Child labour
Torture
Human sacrifice
Ghosts
Magic

And yet there are people in 2012 who believe everything written in the bible. There are people who use it to determine who to vote for, where to send their children to school, how they feel about burning environmental and social and economic and cultural issues. And if that wasn’t bad enough, incredible enough, we can’t just smile wisely and say “there there, one day you will grow up” as we might to a child who tries to live their life by, say, the Harry Potter books, because there are people who want to insist that the rest of the world obey these silly old books as well. There are people making all kinds of pronouncements about the environment, about bringing up children, about justice, about science, about art and literature, based not on some independent and rational analysis of an issue, but on what they think is said in the bible about it. And in turn appearing in the media, influencing politicians about it, indeed running for political office themselves. Some countries, notably Iran, Saudi Arabia, and America, are now theocracies run by people who know nothing except what someone has told them an old book says.

Angry? You betcha. The modern world is difficult enough, will become more difficult in the future, without the drag on political life from people living in the past. Can’t laugh at these people any more, this is serious.

*By “humans” in what follows I sometimes mean “the whole human race” and sometimes “the humans who wrote the bits and pieces of old manuscript that got collected together and called ‘the bible’”, which is which will be obvious and not of much importance anyway.