“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart
people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” -Mark Twain
My great grandfather and I share two important life events:
we were both born on August 22nd and we were both kidnapped.
In 1916 Robert Matson Perry was 33 years old and living in
Oak Creek, Colorado, supervising the mine that his father owned. Two miners
ambushed him in the dark of night and took him to a remote cabin to hold him
for ransom. His father, Sam Perry, sent the money from Denver by train while
Sam’s eldest daughter, Marjorie, began organizing a posse to rescue her
brother. (I come from a long line of outdoorsy women who frequently camp for
weeks at a time, and hunt things like bobcat and bear. So you can see why
I’m seen as kind of a sissy in my family, just because I’d rather curl up on
the porch with a book about the wild than actually go into it…)
Anyway, Robert managed to escape from his captors, killing
one in the pandemonium, and immediately headed for the telegraph to inform his
father to not send the cash. I can only presume that shooting one’s captor while
escaping from confinement does, in fact, feel like pandemonium because I did
not escape from my captors. In the end, I was simply free to go.
One morning in my mid-thirties I woke up to find three
little triangle-shaped bruises in the shape of a triangle on the inside of my
left arm. It was a strange and solid mark, but not painful nor explainable. So
I let my imagination take hold and concluded that it must be a remnant of some
kind of alien kidnapping device; perhaps an extraterrestrial IV that keeps the
body hydrated and breathing while routine tests are performed.
While it’s easy for me to imagine an alien species more
advanced than we are, using us in much the same way we use mice in our
experiments, I do understand that it’s not a favored topic in polite
conversation, which is why I don’t bring it up very often. Plus, I don’t
actually remember the abduction, so it’s hard to give a point by point
recollection. But I assume that with more of a big-picture point-of-view,
aliens must find it frustrating to watch us. Even though we realize our food is
toxic, we continue to eat; we’re the mice for Monsanto.
Because of Monsanto: crops are contaminated, cancer centers
are as crowded as airports, and farmers all over the world have lost the family
farm. Then, to add insult to injury, this summer one of the most prominent
think tanks in the world invited Darth Vader into the Jedi compound
conversation. (While I’m sure there’s still plenty of worthy unbiased knowledge
to be gleaned at the Aspen Institute, it’s a far cry from the days of Bucky
Fuller. I sure hope they don’t follow that town’s lead and turn it into the
Aspen Bad Ideas Festival.)
You want to hear my idea? I think all the chemically infused
water and genetically modified food we are ingesting directly correlate with
the mass shootings and melee in our world. There has been little to no testing
on GMOs, (mostly because the FDA is Monsanto’s bitch) and for all we know genetically
modified food causes the body to attack the brain like in the book Brain on
Fire by Susannah Cahalan.
It could explain the undeniable increase in autism and
related conditions in our society in the last few decades. I’m already convinced
GMOs are responsible for all the weird diet restrictions we have nowadays. Gluten
intolerance probably has more to do with wheat being genetically modified than with
a suddenly volatile reaction in the human body. Our parents and grandparents didn’t
have nearly as many food allergies because they were eating real food. You
know, back in the days when Monsanto was making Agent Orange.
The good news: Right to Know Colorado submitted nearly
125,000 signatures to the Colorado Secretary of State this summer and
Proposition 105 (labeling GMOs) will be on the ballot in November.* I implore
you to vote to know what we’re eating; if for no other reason, so that the
aliens can see our species’ potential for generational growth!
