This Day in News

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by Michelle Lasley

Michelle Lasley is a mother, wife in Pacific Northwest learning to balance green dreams with budget realities.

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March 9, 2011

Categories: Family, Food, One a Day, Post a Day 2011, The Green Life

Image via Wikipedia

Big Ag is fighting back with paid advertising, trying to put a shine on their tarnished image because of authors Kingsolver, Pollan, Schlosser, and movies like Food, Inc. Wisconsin reworded the bill against collective bargaining, tweaking out key financial components that warranted quorum so they could push their anti-union bill through. It has been rumored that Gov. Walker is in bed with coal, and this is his favor to them: remove unions from mineworkers, and like dominoes the rest will fall.

I was telling a colleague tonight that I won’t watch movies like Lord Save Us from Your Followers because of the negativity present. There is enough negativity in the news, it makes me want to cry.

Conversely, my food club made it in the news again. A local on-line publication did a survey of local buying clubs, and we received a succinct paragraph on what we do. What do we do? We organize buys to empower people to take control of their food choices. We stand together, a union in food, trying to ensure our families have safer food choices.

I had a chemistry teacher in high school who tried to argue that if a scientist broke down the molecular components of an organge and recreated it, by man not nature, it would be the same thing. I retold this story to a colleague, and she retorted, “What they’re going to make the sun?”

I guess Paul Krugman is right. I mean, more so than I thought before. We have a deepening moral divide, more than Tocqueville ever seemed to conceive. Big Business v. Unions. Franken Food v. Organic. Toxic v. All Natural.

Like many parents, I worry about the world we are gifting to our children. I don’t believe it’s fair to create problems on the hope they will have the technology to solve them. I believe it’s a wiser course of action to tread slowly, like the toroise, steadily heading towards a goal. I believe that goal should be guided by moral/ethical boundaries that basically state we do no intentional harm and we keep our hands to ourselves.

I question Google following its own advice, but I really do wish the world would just get on board with “Do no evil.”