Category Archives: One in a Thousand

When You People is Us- Chemical Soup Part 2

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E.O. Schaub

 

Okay— pet peeve time. Last night I found myself at a meeting, and for those of us who have spent any length of time at public meetings, we all know there are two kinds: those which are boooooooooooring, and those at which emotions are running high, for one reason or another. This one was the latter.

 

The thing I hate about the non-boring kind of meeting is that people say all kinds of things they wouldn’t, if not for the heat of the argument, or the intensity of their feeling about the subject at hand. At least, that’s how I like to think about it. So when suddenly the fellow next to you gets all red in the face and publicly says he’s had it, and he’s moving to Pluto, and he’s taking his Zamboni with him, and to heck with all the duck-billed platypuses it helps, I think, to put it in that kind of context, (rather than to give in and publicly call him a duck-billed dunderhead, which, surprisingly, never actually helps.)

 

But back to last night.

 

The meeting to which I refer was the eagerly-awaited informational meeting regarding the herbicide incident which occurred at our local elementary school (see Chemical Soup). I was late to the meeting, which meant I sheepishly scurried in and sat down in the nearest available seat. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized the room had fairly neatly divided itself down the middle along party lines, as if a scrimmage were about to start: the Defensive Farmers versus the Pro-active Parents. Ooooooh, I thought. This is going to get ugly. I found myself wishing there was a third place to sit- if for no other reason than to avoid getting hit when the tomatoes and rotten eggs started flying. Continue reading When You People is Us- Chemical Soup Part 2 →

Throwing the Tiger out with the Bathwater

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E.O. Schaub

“I don’t know, I’m just so, I guess… disenchanted by the whole thing,” a twenty-something young man walking the opposite direction was saying into his cell phone. As our family hurried into the Essex Junction Exposition, weighted down with an impressive assortment of snacks, hats, blankets and sunscreen, I didn’t have much time to ponder this statement. After all, we had an urgent roster of tasks to accomplish in the next 30 minutes— 1. Register, 2. Visit Bathroom, 3. Find Our Schoolmates, and 4. Get Daughter’s Hair And Face Painted in Garish, Girly Colors— in that order.

We were walking with the stream-like flow of hundreds of other families and seemingly ka-jillions of young Vermont girls into the fairgrounds for one of the most highly anticipated events of our Spring: the Girls On the Run 5K.

For those of you without girls in third grade or older, I will explain that Girls on the Run, along with its partner program for older girls Girls on Track, is something of a phenomenon. The idea, as I understand it, is to combine exercise and healthy living with self-esteem to prepare girls for the onslaught of negative emotions and body image that await them as tweens, teens, and young adults. “Education and preparing girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living,” is the motto posted on the banner of the non-profit’s website, which boasts “more than 150 Girls on the Run councils across the United States and Canada.”

But wait, it gets better. On the “Our Program” page under “Vision” the final goal listed is “to assist in nothing less that a complete transformation in the way girls and women perceive themselves and their place in society.” Continue reading Throwing the Tiger out with the Bathwater →

Chemical Soup

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E.O. Schaub

 

Every once in a while you hear one of these random statistics that actually applies to you, and you sit up and pay a little more attention. Like a few months back I was pretty happy to hear Vermont was officially the healthiest state. Numero uno! How cool is that? I thought to myself, as if I personally had contributed to the state of overall healthiness by first: choosing to live here and second: managing not to get hit by a bus or fall down an elevator shaft on a daily basis. Yay for me! Us! Whatever! We’re not dead!

 

Even without the United Health Foundation’s annual beknighting of the healthiest state (take that Minnesota!) we all have this unconscious assumption- don’t we?- that living in a rural, traditionally agricultural community is a badge of some intrinsic kind of healthiness. So when we hear news like this we smile as if something we knew all along has been confirmed.

 

The tricky thing about these random statistics, though, is that before you can so much as pat yourself on the back for having the foresight to live in a particular place or be born from some genetically fantastic parents or whatever, you can bet your healthy little fanny there’ll be another random statistic coming down the pike to make you hopelessly depressed again.

 

In my case it was the stunner of a realization that Vermont, and my area of Vermont in particular, has some fairly high cancer rates: the incidence of three big ones- colorectal, breast and cervical- all reportedly higher than national average. Whoops. Yes, we’re all just delightfully healthy right up until the polyps metastasize. Continue reading Chemical Soup →