Good Evening, God
I didn’t want to come and work on this. My overwhelming inability to describe a Different World View depressed me. I mean, it is hard enough to write about significant differences of opinion. But, an opposite Word View? Really! How did a lifelong liberal democrat come to diverge from her dearest friends? How did this happen to me, I ask?
I’m chuckling. The usual way. Slowly at first and then all of a sudden.
First, God, You seem to have given me a funny sort of mind. I collect odd facts. For example, back in grad school while taking a medical reference class I came across the fact that in the late 1800s Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard had a great clash of viewpoints. Pasteur had created a Germ Theory of health. And Claude Bernard held to the Terrain Theory of health. Pasteur believed specific germs caused specific illnesses. So those germs had to be killed. Bernard believed that the body’s “terrain” or “internal environment” determined our state of health. When the body is functioning in homeostasis, and immunity and detoxification are operating well, he claimed there was a healthy terrain that could handle various pathogenic microorganisms that inevitably are thrown its way.
I remember thinking — Bernard is right!
The discovery decades later that our body is 90% other creatures — probably billions of diverse kinds — and only 10% human — caught my eye. Then there was the case of C. Dif (Clostridium difficile) a bacteria that actually killed the wife of one of Kit’s co-workers. The more antibiotics that were pitted against it the worse it got. So, when I read the news years later that a single infusion of poop from a healthy person actually cured 90% of the sufferers in two or three days I was delighted!
It seemed a clear case of how a healthy body — with bacteria and other creatures in balance — maintains health.
Cut to this pandemic. I saw the news that people with low levels of vitamin D were much more likely to die from COVID 19. I stepped up our vitamin D intake and we got more sunlight. And then the news that folks with more pigment (less able to absorb vitamin D from sunlight) seemed to have higher death rates. Hmm. Why wasn’t the government suggesting vitamin D supplements as something folks could do right away to increase their health and resilience?
Then there were the negative consequences of the methods the government did implement. The lockdowns cost many people on the bottom half to loose jobs and to loose the ability to feed their families. Those of us on the top half really failed to understand that the handouts did not make up the difference. And those who kept on working scorned those who put “money over lives”. But, if you are poor, money is the essence of staying alive. A classic class failure to understand divergent realities.
And the social distance rule? Really? As if we don’t live and move and have our being in a vast soup of OTHER. If a single teaspoon of healthy soil has one billion bacteria and other life forms, what do we think the dust of the earth is doing? And what about our bodies? I imagine we are all Pig Pen’s with clouds of viruses, bacteria, fungi and as yet unnamed creatures floating all around us. That interaction is what gives herd immunity. Not some experimental alteration of our DNA or is it RNA? Whatever!
Creating fear of our fellow human beings seems diabolical to me.
Sigh. . . enough said for tonight! Part III tomorrow.
Story teller,
A Moment with God 
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