Houston City Councilman: "You don't die from the flu".

It's not as if we don't already know Texas is a hotbed of crazy. In the scheme of things, Houston is one of the more diverse cities in the state, and the country. Ethnically, culturally, there are people of many backgrounds here, from African immigrants to Latino and Caucasian descendants of old state founders. Because of this, the politics of the city tend to sway from Republican to Democrat, depending on the vibe. Unfortunately, some of those Republicans have a bit of The Crazy. 

 

I'm talking about people like city Councilman Jack Christie, who recently claimed "You don't die from the flu". Houston is currently assessing whether or not to accept 3 million dollars in federal funding to expand childhood vaccinations against the Flu. To the city council's credit, the vote went 15-1. The sole exception? Jack Christie.

Three things to point out about why he voted against it.
1.) The government doesn't have the money to pay for it and we'll have to pay it back. Sounds like a Tea Party vibe right off the bat.
2.) Natural immunity is superior, while vaccines create an artificial immunity. In other words, better to suffer through it and gain a natural advantage.
3.) The media is embellishing how deadly the flu really is. Really?

Mother Jones had an informative article about the flu just a week ago. One of its informative charts detailed where the fly was spreading at the highest rates. Want to guess which state was part of that red zone? That's right, Texas. Alongside several states in the south and midwest, Texas has one of the highest transmission rates in the country. Don't trust a crazy liberal rag? Even the Plano Star has an article about how many people are catching the Flu in this state.

The councilman also ignores the fact that flu vaccines aren't just beneficial for you, but your neighbor as well. Simply because you don't come down with a bad strain doesn't mean it won't be a bad strain for the elderly couple across the way. Health officials are of the general consensus that vaccines are one of the most important advents of the 20th century. They save lives, thousands of them, and how their importance is up for debate is beyond me.

Sometimes people are under a misconception that we've found a cure for viruses, in the same way we have effective antibiotics. We don't. There aren't cures for viruses, only vaccines to boost our immunities. Sometimes vaccines are so effective they push a virus to extinction, but that's a rare occurrence. Viruses like the flu, which have multiple, mutated strains over just the last few years, are still deadly and still require vigilance.

But hey, what does that matter to Jack Christie? He never got a vaccine, and he's fine, which means all of our lives should mirror his experience perfectly. So good luck kids. If you come down with the flu because there wasn't funding for vaccines? Blame men like Houston City Councilman, Jack Christie. Because your life isn't worth the money to preserve it for men like him.

Food Racism - What Genocide Looks Like in the 21st Century

Last week I was asked to screen Soul Food Junkies, a documentary that was to begin airing on PBS this week, at a local gathering of chefs, nutritionists and community activists. Soul Food Junkies deal with the unhealthy relationship we have with food, our addiction to it, and a number of preventable diseases we could avoid if we only ate at least a few greens every week. I myself love to eat fresh. I love vegetables, fruits, big salads, whole wheat. You know, the good stuff. I'm not here to argue the effects of genetic splicing and such, because that is another debate. In fact, it's a debate that some people in the United States can't even begin to wrap their minds around, and that's because they lack access to any fresh food whatsoever. These people live in communities where there is only 1 grocery store per every 10,000 people. In better off communities, that number is more like 3 grocery store per every 10,000. This prevents lower income people from having access to healthy foods, and they live in what we call a food desert.

 

While Soul Food Junkies deals with a number of health issues, one topic it touches on, and that deserves its own movie, is the racism of food. A number of the talking heads, and the narrator himself, bring up the fact that in the modern era, minorities, who make less money on the dollar to a white male and who tend to occupy lower income jobs as well as have a higher rate of unemployment, occupy these food deserts at disproportionate rates. 

 

Lack of access to healthy food leads to consumption of unhealthy foods at a higher rate. Fast foods, fried foods, become the main diet as opposed to the occasional indulgence. Worse than eating bad foods is the absence of eating any healthy foods. I myself once worked at a Title I school with low income kids who got their only fresh vegetables from our cafeteria. At home, they never saw actual, fresh veggies on their plates. What vegetables they got were soaked in cooking grease.

This isn't entirely on the parents when there is no easy access to grocery stores, especially in some lower income communities where transportation is done on foot or by bus. The insidious consequence, though, are the higher rates of destructive, preventable diseases that arise in these minority communities. An entire generation is being destroyed by diabetes and cancer, just from lack of access to quality food. It's genocide, the destruction of a people, but a genocide committed not quickly and with guns, but slowly and by preventing lack of access to food. People are being starved out, forced to low quality consumption. In fact it's no different from the situation of slaves over a century ago that were forced to eat the lowest quality foods that were left over from the masters table.
I'm not the only one who thinks of it as genocide, either. The documentary implies the same thing, and a number of the panelists screening the film that night made the same accusation. There's hope, however.

Mother Jones has had a series of quality articles food deserts and urban gardens. For instance, did you know that in Chicago, when local urban gardens have been planted for the community to participate in, that crime dropped significantly? As one of the panelists told me about his experience in California, "the kids went from slanging dope to slanging alfalfa seeds." We need to see more of these, as well as more supermarkets with quality foods. Even though supermarkets aren't immediate cures for bad food habits, which will require education of a population, they at least provide options that some people don't currently have. Heading into the future there's a tough struggle coming. Quality food must be made cheaper, so that families can better afford it. However, how that food is made and its impact on the environment is going to come up in the same breath. If $20 of fruits and vegetables can be made as cheap and long lasting as $20 of white bread and processed cheese, there may be some headway. Urban gardens provide at least one way of possibly providing this sort of access to the poor.

It's a tough question that will need to be tackled, but at least people are finding ways to tackle it, and I hope you'll think about this topic if you never have before. In the meantime, give Soul Food Junkies a watch, airing this month on Independent Lens on your publicly supported Public Broadcast System!