Recently I had a once in a lifetime opportunity fall into my
lap. Now it’s wasn’t exactly earth shattering, and many people wouldn’t
appreciate it as much as I did, but nonetheless it made my month (and that’s
saying something about the month that contains my wedding anniversary, my
birthday, and Halloween). As my tale unfolds, you will find that in the end
things didn’t quite go as planned, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. On
October 6th 2012, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly decided to hold a debate in the George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Auditorium. My husband and I
were among the distinguished attendees. Distinguished however only by our
tenacity in scoring tickets online for this small event, relentlessly scouring
the internet for cheap seats and, when none could be found, grossly overpaying some
scalper for the privilege of watching these two guys duke it
out verbal style.
So with great anticipation, on the day of the event we made the four and a half hour drive to
Springfield, VA, where we abandoned our car and hopped the Metro all the way
into the city. It’s a fabulous ride, and I highly suggest it for anyone
visiting our nation’s capital. It’s by no means posh, but there’s something
comfortably zen about sitting back and letting the train car zoom around
corners at what would seem unsafe speeds, to then come to a rocking gentle stop
at each station. Am I the only one that thinks Regan National
Airport looks like it belongs on Tatooine? I doubt it was intentional, but having an airport reminiscent of one of the biggest pop culture phenomenon pleases me, and I would like to see it repeated again. Maybe if more Supreme Court hearings were
held Gangham Style, the youngsters would get more involved in politics.
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| Hi Mom. |
After we checked into our hotel, we tried to fit as many
touristy things into the few remaining hours we had before the big event. We
went to the Mall, and walked the entire length from the Capital Building, all
the way to the GWU campus. We tried to check out the Washington Monument, but
it was still closed due to earthquake damage. We did manage to stop along the
way to visit the WWII memorial, which neither of us had yet seen. Even for
someone, like myself, who had no family fight in that war (that I know of
anyhow), it was rather breathtaking and somewhat sad. Yet it still managed to
be beautiful and full of a weird hope that I’m not a talented enough wordsmith
to properly express. It’s just a feeling you get as you stand there, the noise
of the rushing waters from oh so many fountains drowning out the sounds of
traffic and noisy kids and their parents telling them to “just hold still so I can snap
this picture will ya?”
We eventually made our
way towards campus and the auditorium. We actually at one point took some weird
wrong turn and found ourselves on a series of abandoned roads – abandoned except
for the armed guards and signs warning against attempted interaction with the
absent but presumably well trained guard dogs. It's easy to get lost in the spectacle of cherry blossoms and to forget that so much of Washington DC is shrouded in secrecy and security. Leaving that Tom Clancy-esque scenery behind, we found a cute outdoor restaurant to grab a quick bite.
After a dinner of small plates including shrimp on jalapeno polenta cakes, spinach and
goat cheese salad, and heirloom Caprese over baby arugula, we managed to make
it to the event and through the metal detectors – I, of course, setting them
off with my clunky array of costume jewelry that I never think to remove
beforehand. Maybe I just like getting wanded in public. Actually, no, I really
don’t.
It was once inside that my husband first abandoned me to go
to the bathroom. But he was back quickly, so we found our seats and prepared
ourselves to be entertained. We were not disappointed.
Stewart stole the show with his remote controlled rising floor platform, which
he used to tower his self-proclaimed Hobbit sized body over the head of his 6’4
opponent anytime he made a valid point or received gratuitous applause. To top
things off, O’Reilly didn’t even come across like a total jerk, even though his
use of small poster/flash cards made one think that he was ill-equipped to
address such a young internet infographic digital savvy audience. He also, much
to many people’s astonishment, went so far as to call the country’s acceptance
(and adherence to) the Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh-style hate spewing as the single worst thing to have happened to
modern journalism and politics.
My favorite moment, where, despite my attempt to maintain
decorum, I burst into loud spontaneous clapping and whooping, was a point
Stewart made about Title IX and how government spending and intervention can
have tremendously positive effects. I couldn’t wait to discuss this one further
with my companion, however it was after the debate was over, as we stood
outside amongst the throngs of students eager for a iphone-to-instagram shot of
one of the two debaters leaving the auditorium, that my husband had to excuse himself
again. Quickly. With no public bathrooms within eyeshot, he snuck into the GWU
student center and was gone for at least ten minutes. I was left to amuse myself,
sitting on the concrete steps, smoking cigarettes, and eavesdropping on the
kids' excited furthering of the rumors they heard about which door Jon Stewart
would be walking out of, and how they could circumvent his bodyguards to gain an
autograph.
I was getting eager to get a move on. This was, after all,
our anniversary trip, and we planned to make the most of whatever debauchery we
could get ourselves into in this new and different city. We have friends that
are either from the DC area or who visit a lot, who had recommended a great
bar/restaurant that happened to be a block from our hotel. This was to be our
spring board towards a night of festivities. Once my husband finally emerged,
looking a little green but assuring me he was ok, we took the metro back to the
few blocks we considered base camp and began walking towards the bar. When we
passed our hotel, he excused himself again to go into our room to use the
restroom. I waited, somewhat impatiently but still sympathetically, in the
hotel lobby. After fifteen minutes, he came down, and sheepishly admitted that beer
was a bad idea, and that he needed to call it a night. We spent the rest of the
night in the hotel room, he going back and forth to the bathroom, each time making
horrendously sad noises, while I overpaid for pay per view movies, forced
him to eat the errant wheat thin which we had purchased at the CVS down the
street, and fretted over his fever. Needless to say, it was a good thing the hotel messed up our
reservation and booked us a room with two beds instead of one.
Alas, this was the entirety of our trip. What started out
fun and exciting and rosy cheeked, was brought down hard by what we assumed was
just some stomach virus that picked the most inopportune time to strike.
After what can only be described as the most absolutely dreadful car ride home,
he slept for two days. On the second day he woke up with a stiff neck.
Now this stiff neck could have been attributed to numerous
things – sleeping in a strange bed (or rather not really sleeping but moreover
dozing then waking up every twenty minutes to run to the bathroom). Or it could
have been the awful wracking and straining that the body goes through during
all that mess - something we all know so I will spare you the gross details. It
could have been the car ride home. Or it could mean that this wasn’t a stomach
flu at all.
It could mean that this was listeria.
Listeria sickness comes from a bacteria found in contaminated food, and is responsible for one of the highest instances of food poisoning deaths (salmonella being number one). It has a
mortality rate of 20%. One of it's dangers comes from it's determination to morph into meningitis, hence our worries over the stiff neck. Even
though the vomiting and other digestive discomforts had ceased, we both still
agreed that he should go to the doctor, just in case. My husband has a history
of ER visits and hospital stays for food poisoning and stomach flus, and I have
a history of overreacting to minor illnesses and turning them into worse case
scenarios. Turns out, he was going to be ok. It was just a stomach virus,
probably picked up at one of the crowded events we had attended in the previous
weeks.
And so here is where we get to the heart of this post - the real reason for my overly long introduction. I've been telling you all about my trip to DC and my husband’s gross interactions with a myriad of public toilets for one simple reason – to point out our reaction to his stiff neck and our reasoning for sending him to the
doctor. I mentioned Listeria above, and that really was a major concern we had - which the doc said we were justified in thinking given the prevalence of outbreaks.
In fact, I only mentioned the contents of the dinner we had eaten in DC, not to
brag about being foodies (because I really hate that whole cultural trend of calling oneself a “foodie” just because you don't eat processed garbage from a box), but to demonstrate
the kinds of foods we tend to eat. Fresh, raw, or lightly cooked vegetables. As
of late, our beloved fruits and veggies are under attack from more and more exposure
to bacteria that can make people very sick and sometimes even dead. Leafy greens and sprouts, when eaten raw, are fast becoming one of the most dangerous foods to eat, and I don't want to live in a world without kale. You're not even safe to grow your own because contamination can live in the seeds as well. Since when did salad become the food equivalent to Russian Roulette? Leave that to the gastronomical daredevils who are into fugu or raw oysters.
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| Some suggested reading. |
A 2011 listeria outbreak, caused by tainted cantaloupe,
was the deadliest outbreak of this particular bacteria in almost one hundred
years – well past the point of prevention by modern technology and (most
importantly) modern attention to the safety of our food. The worst part, the
part that really burns me, is that in the weeks prior to the deaths, the responsible
farm had received a passing grade from food inspectors. Had the Food and Drug Administration let
everyone down? I mean, aren’t they there to protect us? In this case no,
because it wasn’t the government that gave these farmers top notch safety ratings and the go ahead to use
improper machinery to sort the fruit. It wasn’t the government that either ignored or missed the
improper storage and gross negligence that eventually led to the deaths of 33 people and one miscarriage. It was an outside non-governmental inspection company. Yes, the
safety of our food has been privatized, and it appears to be failing.
According to a devastating report by Bloomberg (who, in this
age of one-sided journalism, seems to do a fabulous job of just telling it like
it is), the FDA simply doesn’t have the money to properly inspect our food. They
now have to rely on what they call “third party auditors” (those same groups
that gave that cantaloupe farm glowing passing marks just weeks before they
killed a bunch of people). It’s these third party privatized auditors who are
responsible for almost 94% of the inspections performed in order to ensure that
farms and food processing plants aren’t cutting corners or simply unintentionally
screwing up. The FDA asked for more money, but “the food industry lobbied for,
and won, enactment of a law in January 2011 that expanded the role of auditors
-- and foreign governments -- in vetting producers and distributors of food
bound for the U.S.”
For those of you who have read this blog before, it’s pretty
obvious that I have a lot of progressive/liberal leanings. However, I don’t
consider myself party affiliated – just because I’ve never voted for a
Republican doesn’t make me a Democrat. I say this because I want to make sure
that you people are aware that, while I don’t believe in a small
inconsequential federal government, I also don’t believe that the government
should run everything. I don't want people to disregard these words as just another Democrat blathering on in favor of the nanny state. However, and
this just seems so painfully obvious to me, when the end goal of an
organization is to ensure the safety of others and not to turn a profit, then a
privatized system just plain makes no sense. Isn't one of the tenants of capitalism the fostering of an atmosphere amenable to and encouraging of competition between companies, so as to maximize profits and provide better products to those that will purchase them? This doesn't work when the purpose of your organization is likely not to benefit those paying for your services. Would you hire an inspection
company who consistently finds fault and problems in your process, as they should when they are there to be found? It seems like the best and most competent inspectors would be those that find and force correction of the most infractions, thus angering those that hired them in the first place. One would think that if left entirely up to the free market, those auditors who do the "best" jobs would go out of business fast
and hard. It’s not in a company’s best interest to continuously bash its client
base and point out where they need to spend more money simply on the chance that they could cause an
outbreak. Not to mention the fact that these third party auditors, not being under the government purview, have less accreditation, credentials, and oversight and often already work for the company for which they are inspecting. It's mind boggling the depths to which this critical aspect of a healthy society has been corrupted. And for what? Money? The assurance that the "govmint can't tell me what to do"?
The idea of privatization
has been a major talking point
this election – from Social Security to Big Bird. In some places, I can
understand the inclination to explore private sector options. However in
some,
it’s just doesn’t bode well for maintaining the welfare of Americans,
which in
the end is the one true function of the federal government. Education,
the FDA,
and public broadcasting are some of the biggest examples (and to a
lesser extent
healthcare – but that’s a topic for a different day). Sometimes it's
beneficial to everyone if the federal government steps in, as with Jon
Stewart's praising of Title IX. Or what about the GI Bill? Head Start? Welfare for Work programs? The list goes on. Sometimes
government programs don't work, and sometimes they collapse under the
weight of bureaucracy and corruption. But you know what? Sometimes things have to fail for a society to move forward. If every program worked
from the start, if every government official had all the answers from
the beginning, then there would be no need for elections or reform or
oversight committees. We would live in a Utopian society filled with
unicorns and butterflies, and we would all get paid in candy and hugs,
and we would be happy about it.
People always argue that “what company would purposefully
cut corners and make people sick? Those businesses would go under so fast.”
Yeah, that makes sense in theory, but it’s not reality. It’s part of the
idealistic notion that businesses, left to their own devices, would put consumer
wellbeing above their own stock interest. What a wonderful world that would be, huh?
Plus, if that were true, then why are food borne illness recalls on the rise?
Why are more and more people getting sick from contaminated food caused by
distributors with sub-par conditions? Plus, there’s that old risk analysis adage where sometimes it’s just cheaper to pay the lawsuit settlements than it would be to fix the
problem initially.
One night I found myself discussing union
labor disputes with an "old school Republican," and he (unintentionally)
made the best argument against privatizing organizations designed to give a leg up and even the
playing field for the little guys (the kids, the workers, the public). He said “a
company’s main responsibility is to its shareholders.” I think he was absolutely
correct, and this idea extends far past our late night dinner table debate. Simply
put, privatizing the aforementioned government programs would basically negate
the necessity for those programs, because it takes the focus away from the
people the programs are intended to help. It makes profit the main goal of
those programs, instead of service.
Let’s return to food for a moment. It was the utter failings
of the private sector’s ability to act humanely and safely that led Teddy
Roosevelt to sign the Food and Drug Act of 1906 which ultimately led to the
creation of the FDA. So history showed us that the private sector failed, and
when the government stepped in, things got better. Why then, are we letting the
FDA back slide back into The Jungle? I have a hard time thinking that it's just all greed. The idealist in me wants to believe that people just aren't thinking about it correctly.
I’ve never understood people’s insistence that you need to
run a country like a business. A business is designed primarily to make money – to benefit
the shareholders. I see no problem with this, but it's not the same with government. We can break it down like this, the “shareholders”
in a country would be the politicians and the very wealthy (we’ll liken them to
investors since they pay the most taxes). The middle class, the poor, the
children, the elderly, the labor force – those would be the "customers." This would be the vast majority of people in our country/business, and without whom there would simply be no country/business. As we've seen in the past 12 years, screwing over the "customers" to make money for the "shareholders" doesn't work. It's because a country simply isn't a business. A country's main responsibility is to its customers - to the safety, health, and fair treatment of it's people. Asserting that a
government should model itself the other way around in order to bolster its position as a global economic giant doesn't ring of the America I love. You're thinking of
China.
At the end of the day, I don’t have all the answers, nor do
I pretend to. I’m not a business woman or a farmer. I’m just someone who really loves
cantaloupe. I’m someone whose husband sat through the last hour of a political
debate, an event we both looked so forward to and which was to be part of a celebration, in digestive distress and pain. I’m someone who thought, given what I know about the correlations between defunding the FDA and the rise in contaminated food, that the distress and pain might have been caused by a
bacteria allowed to fester due to the systematic chipping away of valuable government intervention in favor of this all mighty concept of privatization. I’m also someone who just wants to be able to eat raw broccoli sprouts again without fear. They go great on just about everything.
