I
recently saw the 1978 version of the film, The Invasion of The Body Snatchers, starring
Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, in which earth is invaded by cute little
pink flowers that change into pods that devour real people and their emotions
and passions and all the good people stuff and leave empty shells of people
walking around like zombies.
So?
What’s new? That’s the point. I Netflixed the movie because I liked the actors.
Brooke Adams is a fave, though she doesn’t work enough for my taste. And,
Donald Sutherland, well, ‘nuff said. They were both brilliant, as usual, but I
didn’t expect to hear what I did. It was the character of Nancy Bellicec,
played by Veronica Cartwright, actress of the eyes too big for her face, giving
her the most expression-filled demeanor of all, found to be awesome for horror
films by many directors since.
Nancy
had all the best lines. She was the one who told her husband, played by Jeff
Goldblum, “Don’t touch that! It could be toxic!” To which her hippy husband
replied, “It’s a pink flower, honey.” Nancy – the sweet masseuse who insisted her
plants have feelings - exploded with one amazing line after another, to which I
responded with a gaping mouth. After Nancy was done, I realized I was watching
something a lot deeper than a movie about an alien invasion. Not that an alien
invasion isn’t deep or scary enough. The original book, The Body Snatchers was written in 1956! I know the
accepted idea is that the author, Jack Finney, was referring to the McCarthy
trials. But, as I listened to Nancy, I couldn’t help thinking and feeling
(since I’m not a pod, yet) – A lot has happened since this was written and
it’s still happening now!
Here’s what Nancy and Elizabeth, a
health official (Brooke Adams), and Jack, Nancy’s husband (Jeff Goldblum) said:
Jack: This smells lovely.
Nancy: I want you to listen to me.
Jack: I am listening to you, Nancy.
Elizabeth: That flower. Where did
you get that?
Jack: In the vase with the others.
Nancy: Put it down, Jack.
Elizabeth: It's a pod with a flower
on it. I could not find that flower in any book.
Nancy: Jack, put it down.
Jack: It's a pink flower, honey.
Nancy: It could be toxic.
Elizabeth: I have seen these
flowers all over. They grow like parasites on other plants. Where are they
coming from?
Nancy: Outer space.
Jack: They're not from outer space.
Nancy: Why not?
Jack: They're not. Why? What are
you talking about? A space flower?
Nancy: Why not a space flower? Why
do we always expect metal ships?
Jack: I've never expected metal
ships.
Nancy: There must be other ways they
get in our systems.
Elizabeth: Right. They could be
getting into us through touch or fragrance.
Jack: We would never even notice
it, not from the impurities we have. I mean, we eat junk and we breathe junk.
Elizabeth: I don't know where they're coming from, but I
feel as though I've been poisoned. We've gotta take those flowers in and have
them analyzed. There's something here.
Nancy: They could get into us and
screw up our genes like DNA, recombine us, change us.
Jack: Oh, of course!
Nancy: This is the same way those
rockets landed years ago, so those spacemen could mate with monkeys and create
the human race. It's happening now!
Let’s
put the alien take-over thing aside. It’s a moot point.
WARNING LABEL: The sensitive ones should leave the room. Or, if you are the kind
of person who says, “Who are you to tell me what I can or can’t put in my
body?” then don’t read any further. Go to McDonalds or Taco Bell.
The Real Invasion
of the Body Snatchers has been going on for about 70 years now, since the end
of World War II, when two things took over – one, mass production of our food
and two, mass transportation of our food. Our food used to be grown and
prepared in small batches of whole, fresh ingredients. It was placed in cloth
sacks or wooden crates. Liquids were in glass bottles, crocks, cans or kegs.
Our food was still natural and close to homemade. Bread was brown. Cows were not given artificial hormones. However, when farms got
larger and more specialized, our food needed to be transported longer
distances. No longer could you make a product naturally. Mix together the
ingredients and those ingredients usually separated or looked terrible in a
jar. You couldn’t transport it like that anyway. You needed preservatives. You
needed stabilizers like guar gum, which is not thickening enough on its own
without adding borax occasionally, or stabilizers like dehydrogenated animal fat,
which is akin to plastic and could be already lumped in different corners of your body. You would need artificial
coloring. Then, since you stripped the natural
nutrients, perhaps to create the more attractive white bread, you would need to add artificial
vitamins. You needed to add salt to keep food from spoiling. You needed to add
sugar to make it taste better after you’d added salt. You needed flavor
enhancers like monosodium glutamate in order to compete with companies using
flavor enhancers in their products. You might have to heat the food to a
carcinogenic-causing temperature. Packaging itself became artificial, a risky
business that is just now becoming a suspected source of poisoning.
Refrigeration became common. Food was transported from tropical areas to colder
areas. People no longer ate seasonal food. They could get oranges in winter.
Nice, right? Tropical fruit lowers the body temperature. Not as nice in the
north as it is in the south. Tropical fruit, as a matter of fact, any locally
grown food, has a purpose. Winter squashes, burdock, onions, all these grow
naturally in colder climates and are good for circulation, i.e., keeping warm
in winter.
Also, around the
end of World War II came our love affair with science. We’re just now
discovering that some of the wonders of science may be poisoning us – polyester
(carpets, drapes, sofas, etc.), air-conditioning, plastic – toxins decomposing and
entering our lungs - even as we sit in the evenings and watch our televisions -
which poison our minds as well as our bodies. Microwaves were invented to
rearrange the molecules of our food. Most of us, including this writer, sit at
computer screens radiating God-knows what into our brains, all day long. We
keep cell phones tucked in our pockets next to our gut or attached directly to
our ears. We wash our hair with suspicious unctions, and blindly slather
possible cancer-causing creams over ourselves to prevent possible cancer
causing UV rays from reaching our skin. Scientists began creating
GeneticallyModified Organisms by infiltrating plant DNA with pesticides and DNA from
foreign plants and animals, such as bacteria into corn or soy. GMOs are now
thought to cause ulcerations in the stomach and intestine.
Bees are dying by
the millions. Even
our pets are getting sicker. Celiac disease, a troubling sensitivity to wheat, seemed to come out of nowhere and is increasing. Animals have been
cloned and we
are eating the meat of clones, deemed “safe” by our FDA.
Milk is full of
hormones and antibiotics. Also deemed to be safe.
Got milk? No need
for an alien take-over. We are lining up.
We are now four
generations of degeneration. The last generation grew up entirely on artificial
foods. I call them “the Froot Loops (notice the word froot is not the word
fruit) for breakfast, microwaved pizza for lunch, microwaved mac and cheese for
dinner” generation. What happens to a generation that never ate any real food?
Here’s the bottom
line:
Cancer was rare
before World War II. You had to be seriously out of balance to get cancer. Now,
everyone expects to get cancer or some other serious degenerative disease, like
diabetes or heart disease. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in
the U.S. Diabetes is increasing worldwide.
In the ‘50s, only the
“bad” kid had ADD or ADHD. Allergies were rare. Autism, also rare. Asthma,
rare. Now, asthma, allergies, autism, behavioral problems, all seem to be epidemic. In
her book
Louder Than Words, actress
Jenny McCarthy tells how she relieved many of her son’s autism symptoms,
including not speaking, by eliminating dairy and sugar from his diet. In the
book
Crime & Diet by Michio
Kushi, you can read about the experiment at the Tidewater Virginia Detention
Home for Boys, which under the direction of Frank Kern and Stephen J.
Schoenthaler, in 1981, took sugar out of the diet of the boys in the home for
three months. The boys, ages 12-18, were in detention for crimes including
alcohol and narcotic violations, disorderly conduct, larceny and burglary. During
the time sugar was not in their diets, the boys’ incidents of violence
decreased by 45%.
Right now, drugs
are being used to treat allergies, asthma, autism, ADD and ADHD and other
physical and behavioral conditions. Plus, drugs for the side effects caused by
those drugs - many of which are now being suspected of causing cancer.
You can try to get
cancer rates from the
American Cancer Society. But, you have to dig through
individual types of cancer, regions, sex, etc. and a whole spectrum of
specifics designed to discourage you. Here’s some plain talk from
preventcancer.com:
What then is driving the modern cancer epidemic? Study after study points
to the role of runaway industrial technologies, particularly those based on
petrochemicals. The explosive growth of the petrochemical industry since the
1940s has far outpaced legislative and regulatory controls, producing a
dizzying array of synthetic chemicals that have never been screened for human
health effects: of the roughly 75,000 chemicals in use today, only some 3
percent have been tested for safety. For over fifty years, in other words, the
American public has been unknowingly exposed to avoidable carcinogens from the
moment of conception until death.
If you think you
can handle the truth, I recommend liking Dr. Helen Caldicott on Facebook. Dr.
Caldicott has been an anti-nuclear champion for decades. She’ll keep you
informed of the daily radioactive seepage in the world - it’s not just from
nuclear accidents any more.
One of the most
compelling reasons I am writing this particular post is the recent death of one
of my macrobiotic teachers from liver cancer. How does a macro create cancer? I
have asked myself, over and over. The answer is simple. We are all susceptible.
We are all vulnerable. I could be riddled with cancer even as I write. Usually,
it’s your favorite binge food that gets you in the end. Yet, each day, as a
macro, I observe changes in myself and when those changes are undesirable, I
think, what have I done to cause this? And I change that. For instance, I have gotten rid of horns growing on my head
and sometimes my arms, since my genetic code doesn’t know what to do with the
information it’s receiving, i.e., I am not a baby goat, by giving up goat
cheese. With goat cheese went a horrible, persistent pain in my right knee that
was keeping me from walking without a limp. I still have an occasional twinge
in that knee from arthritis I inherited from my beautiful Italian grandmother
and mother, and I’m working on that too with exercise and other dietary
adjustments, but the arthritis is nothing like the stabbing agony of the arterial
blockage caused by excess dairy. I also got rid of a horrible, nagging ache in
my neck that was causing me to lose sleep and wrap my neck with a scarf indoors–
by stopping the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I drank occasionally when I went out with
a certain friend. I noticed the pain always came after drinking the Dunkin’
Donuts coffee. Gone, and gone! Also, by stopping Maxwell House coffee at home,
I got rid of intestinal bleeding. Gone. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had been
ingesting something other than coffee with both those brands. (Note: Every one
of us is different and different products may be affecting you in different ways. Be honest with yourself when self-reflecting.)
That’s what
macrobiotics can do for you.
However, macrobiotics
is no match for the invisible toxins we consume every day. If I had to say how
my teacher got liver cancer, I would say from self-sacrificing overwork, eating
too strictly and toxins.
Some of those
toxins are in the food we sometimes eat, maybe out of convenience or downright
desperation when we are outside the home, starving and have to eat something fast and get back to
work. Other toxins are ingested from the cars that pass by, cigarette smoke, the strong
perfume of the woman next to us on the train or when we sink down into the sofa
at night exhausted, little spores drift up on the air and enter our nostrils.
The reason I said
that alien invasion was moot is because we are the aliens and we are invading
ourselves. Aliens have already been here and gone. That ship, if you will, has
flown. If they want to return and take over, we will be powerless. However, we are not
powerless against ourselves.
We can change. One
of the things we learned when we began macrobiotics in the ‘70s was to get rid
of all artificial products in our lives, for instance, to wear loose cotton clothing
that breathed and kept human energy flow even and natural. It’s not always easy
to do so, but the closer you can get to clean air, clean home, clean food, the
better off you will be. You might have to put in the extra time and work of
making your own lunch at home, making a pot of beans on the weekend - lentils
or chick peas - great convenience foods that can be stored in the refrigerator
– or a pot of brown rice to always have ready. You might have to avoid fast
foods. Or, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
The problem, as it
was in the film The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, is going to sleep.
That’s when the pods started to take over our human bodies, our passions and
our caring.
Don’t go to sleep.
Stay vigilant. Keep watch over yourself and your loved ones. Take good care. Body
Snatchers are everywhere.
