Money Water

Yes, with sharply increasing numbers of young, healthy people signing up for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the corner appears turned on this supposedly “unpopular” law.

It is precisely because—both before and even more so under the ACA—that people CAN and DO whatever they want in their lifestyle “health” choices and then expect us to pick up the tab for expensive, drastic, procedures to allow coping and limping along for a number of poor quality of life years, that we have the system we have that is causing us the problems it does, and that is on track to go south further.  A system made all the worse by a disconnected society.  A society that is focused for profit on managing chronic things, not on cures and health, and especially, as you’ve just pointed out, not on prevention.  And a society and economic system designed to perpetuate, foment, and channel in the direction of poor lifestyle choices. 

We need to change all that.  Your way of gradual education and cultural shift is far preferable to it changing us, drastically and maybe relatively suddenly, when reality intervenes.  I am all for sugar and fried foods largely going the way of cigarettes.  It will take a lot of wrestling with our tendencies for delay, deflection, denial, and delusion to do so.  I hope the example of your children becomes a trend, but the studies so far are not supportive that enough of the twenty somethings are swinging a new cultural food shift.  Still, they are not doing quite as poorly as projected, so that’s encouraging.  More research is needed.  And, perhaps, education! :)

Speaking of health and wellbeing, one little noticed trend throughout the world (and not just the “developed” world), but especially in the US, is the privatization of water.  Available drinkable water was never overabundant on a planet where much of water is salt-saturated undrinkable (oceans) or locked up in economically inaccessible polar snow and ice.   Add to that how we have stressed the available sources by a combination of overpopulation (and its increased consumption in personal use and irrigation use to feed that population), industrial use (truly massive quantities—it may shock you), and pollution (plus the concentration of those pollutants).

Capitalists know a scarce commodity on the near-horizon when they see it, and they have raced to 1) get laws changed, 2) secure their status and options via friends in the various political processes worldwide, and 3) buy up the rights to or even obtain outright control of water sources.   

It’s early in the process, but not that early, and in a number of cases, private capitalists are in control of water for hundreds of millions of people, businesses, farming operations, etc.  They have been largely crafty (at least so far), making sure not to spook publics and attempting to stay as low key as possible.  Yet they are already seeding the lexicon.  One CEO went as far to say that “water is not a basic human right.”

Chilling? Perhaps.  But more like slow evaporation.  Of available water—and rights.