Cross-posted in immizen.com
A week ago I saw an image circulating in Facebook by my conservative friends. Yes, I have some of those. In it Obama tells a school girl: “We are going to war in Syria because they poison children” and the school girl asks something like: “So why don’t you bomb Monsanto?” I modified the words here a bit because the conservative version is more offensive towards Obama and there is no need for that. We can criticize him without name calling. Unless he becomes Bush III, but so far I have not seen evidence of that.
Before the whole Syria chemical weapon dilemma started, I was seeing a lot of posts in Facebook condemning Monsanto and surprisingly, both conservatives and liberals “liked” those. Bill Maher's question in the image I posted is one of the more recent ones.
I am not one of those who are totally scared about consuming Monsanto engineered foods. Why? The main reason is that I have not seen any valid peer-reviewed evidence that it is harmful. That does not mean it is harmless. We don’t know and only time will tell. And yes, we are all guinea pigs. But we are also guinea pigs when we eat a lot of other food. Depending what restaurants or fast food joints you go to, you don’t know how the food was prepared. We buy other types of processed food that may have been contaminated along the way between harvesting and displaying it in the supermarket shelf or restaurant plate. The FDA cannot inspect every corner of every food plant on every single day and hour of the week. And we eat foods that are perfectly fine for some but cause allergies to others.
What really gets me all riled up about Monsanto, however, is their lobbying influence on government so that we cannot even pass a law to make it a requirement to label those GMO products that we buy in supermarkets. Let the people decide if they want to be a guinea pig or not. Let the people decide if they want to take the risk of eating those GMO foods. Label their darn products. But no. Just like the gun lobby, which has bought our representatives in congress, so has Monsanto.
Now to Syria. There seems to be evidence, according to Obama, that Syria is using chemical weapons on its people. And we should find a way to stop that, but a way that does not mean military involvement. I know less about military strategies than about science, and thus I won’t even speculate what the US should do besides finding and killing Assad. But, in this Monsanto vs Syria choice of action, I do agree that the focus should be on domestic issues. I agree that we should stay away from anything that could start another major war. Many people, left and right, would be happy with that.