Humans use this world like a cigarette butt — one long final satisfying drag in pursuit of the poisoned predilection that promised so much pleasure, then flick it out the window of your speeding car. Maybe people use people the same way — we smoke them, then we crush them out, just like the U.S. Army in Iraq.
And where the butt lands, nobody knows. Urban myths like this come back to haunt us, in our lungs, in that stuff that sticks to our feet, and around that amorphous space known as the heart region.
I once knew a guy, stylish hip liberal type, who was so environmentally conscious he wouldn't toss his butts out the window because he was afraid of starting fires, which is a good reflex. Instead, he'd only throw them out over water, because he lived near the ocean. Indicating the limit of his grasp.
And what's in the water? Our beloved water. Have you checked out Mr. Emoto? Water is alive and communicates to us on a very profound, almost pre-human level. It tells us what to do, in a way. "Mr. Emoto’s work provides factual evidence that human vibrational energy, thoughts, words, ideas and sound affect the molecular structure of water." Learn about how to get wet at
www.wellnessgoods.com/messages.asp
But what's in MY water? Specifically the vast stretch of tropical fantasy where the dolphins play and the cigarette boats zoom by, that eases my roiled mind when messages from the world get too intense, and takes me, in its green eden full of chattering tropical species, to a sun-drenched sanctuary in time.
While I spend my days peering out into cyberspace to catch the rhythm of the noosphere, something terrible happened right under my nose, and in my favorite place in the whole world.
ENGLEWOOD -- A bizarre freeway of fish swimming by the thousands along the shore of Englewood Beach Thursday morning left crowds of beach-goers agog and marine biologists bewildered.
— Englewood Sun-Herald, 8/5/05,
www.sun-herald.com/NewsArchive2/080505/ew11.htm?date=080505&story=ew11.htm
I came upon two turtles jousting the other day. One had flipped the other onto its shell, and his little legs flailed in vain under the beautiful sky. You didn't need a referee to count this guy out. His day was done. So a took a stick and flipped him upright. You should've seen the look I got from the turtle who'd won the fight fair and square. And a hiss, a long, scratchy, wholly unapproving hiss.
Maybe it's like nature's universal response to what we're doing to her. We don't think about the consequences of what we, in our self-directed intent, overlook.
I heard on car radio news the other day a disturbing news item. It was that all the marine life on bottom of Tampa Bay and the Florida coastline from Sarasota (right near me) north to Tarpon Springs ... was dead.
The newspaper story continued.
"I've lived her for 10 years, and I've never seen anything like this. It's incredible," said Bob Ricci of Englewood.
Beach-goers reported that a wide variety of sea creatures came swimming south in a narrow band close to the beach at mid-morning.
Included in the swarm were clouds of shrimp, crab, grouper, snapper, red fish and flounder. They were joined by more usual species, including sea robins, needlefish and eels. It was a mile long.
Sea critters, getting out of town at breakneck speed.
A fish exodus.
Perhaps a prophecy of human migration to come — fleeing the poison as fast you can.
Nearby ecotoxicologists speculated that the fish could have been trying to escape red tide, which regularly sweeps Florida's western beaches almost free of beachgoers, and leaves small dead fish on the shoreline. It also stinks and makes you cough.
"Red Tides" are created by microtoxic organisms, the organism themselves are not toxic, but they produce toxins that that indeed kill fish, cause neurological damage to marine mammals and humans, symptoms of respiratory illness, and muscle aches and pains.
Animal manure has been fingered as a cause of the chemical process that creates these harmful microtoxins. Read more at
www.atlanticbreezes.com/aquatic/
Which describes neurotoxic illness in this scary manner.
These compounds move from nerve, to muscle, to brain, to sinus, to eye, to GI tract, to skin and joint tissues. These symptoms just don't go away but cause chronic illness. Even just breathing the air around the infected areas can cause a contamination. There is a time period before and after an algae bloom or fish kill, approximately two weeks, called recreational and residential contamination. This time period would be in the absence of "fish kills" warnings randomly being designated by state authorities....
First warnings of contamination ...
... multiple symptoms. Fatigue, weakness, muscle aches, cramps, unusual pains like and ice pick going in one’s back or neck, muscle cramps. Also memory loss, especially short term assimilation of data, and sensitivity to bright light, like a new sensitivity to bright lights at night driving would bother you when it hadn't before. Respiratory illness, an increase irritation or chronic respiratory problems that don't go away, even after asthma medications.
Of course, all this is nothing.
Just go to Iraq and take a deep breath of uranium contaminated air, go ahead, take some really deep breaths. This radioactive poison infuses everything in Iraq with the lethal potential to give you cancer in short order, whether you're friend or foe. I know it's an alarming conclusion to reach, but these guys have put into a place a fiendish plan to eliminate a large percentage of the world's population. The principal target venue is the Arab world, but they don't mind wiping out a comfortable coupla million "friendlies". It's acceptable collateral damage, the cost of doing business.
The fleeing fish and the dead marine mammals? 40 big ones the other day in Tampa; I can't remember now whether they were loggerheads or manatees, but they both weigh a thousand pounds, and are gentle and beautiful.
Tampa is a major shipping port, and the bay has an orimulsion plant, a messy energy technology that leaves tons of toxic waste, which regularly slops into the bay’s estuary system. Sarasota had a record sewage spill that wasn’t officially reported until a year later. So much for a timely response.
Too few people realize how the tentacles of thoughtless action have a nasty way of sneaking back into their own lives. As an increasingly frequent example ...
Shellfish poisoning, of whatever sort, is
UNPLEASANT AND OFTEN LETHAL. The onset of symptoms occurs as soon as the victim's digestive system starts to work on the infected shellfish. In the case of
paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), the toxin attacks the nervous system and causes paralysis. There is no antidote;
death occurs from asphyxiation or respiratory paralysis.
— http://museum.gov.ns.ca/poison/redtide.htm
There is no antidote!
What humans produce — mostly waste, but also farm chemicals that leech into rivers and marshes — wends its way through microscopic natural processes back into our food chain where it winds up helping to destroy our bodies. It’s a perfect karmic feedback loop, when you think about it.
What humans produce that bounces back on our own health is not only a symbol of the delusionary direction of our lives, but a report card on the kind of unconscious dweebs that we really are.
Somehow all animals learn to know that, and fear man like the plague he is. And now my neighborhood fish know it, too, or at least the ones that managed to survive.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida whose essays are seen on hundreds of websites around the world. www.johnkaminski.com/
Last updated 22/08/2005
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