My husband reads the paper every morning while having breakfast, I guess like most people. I can't do that. It makes my blood pressure go up first thing in the morning and I'm in foul mood for the rest of the day. Instead I like to spread it out during the day when I'm very busy and don't have too much time to reflect on the stupidity of human beings. Well anyway it works kind of, I still rant a fair amount for hum, some time after I read someting particularly outrageous. Perfect plan for me. Spreading the rants. Now, today was supposed to be a beautiful day in spite of a chopped up sleep last night. I was just sitting to baguette, quince jam and about 2 liters of the blackest coffee when he blurts out: "I just read something really dumb". Theatrical pause. Wearily glancing up at the spread out newspaper, I sigh and say : "mmmm, what a surprise. What? " Well, yes I'm human after all, and who at that point wouldn't say "what?". Husband continues: "They did a study in Africa about AIDS and circumcision and found that you have a lesser change of catching it if you are circumcised. So now they are telling people in Africa to get circumcised." Long silence while I examine in my head all the implications of this statement. The only thing I could come up with was : " who is the stupid idiot who thought that saying this to people who believe that having sex with a virgin is going to CURE them of AIDS was a good idea? I mean we all know how it is going to be interpreted: Oh, I'm circumcised so I can have sex safely with whomever. And I'm not even going to mention the very high risk of infections due to this surgery. Now, again, how do stupid people like that get to be in charge of anything, and especially how do they get to be in charge of life and death situations like this. Africa is a beautiful country that I fell totally in love with many many years ago. It's full of amazing people that are poor, yes, but are also smart, very resourceful and hardworking. They are not helpless and they don't wallow in their misfortune. They need to be helped intelligently not put further down by the white people than they already have. It reminds me of this article I read years ago where, again, stupid dumb " white experts" backed up by well known makers of formula, declared that babies in Africa should be fed formula instead of their mother's milk. Similar to what they did in the seventies in the western counries. The result: scores of babies dying or being very sick. Anybody with half a brain and who would have been in Africa for half an hour could have foretold this. You need clean water to make milk from formula and a lot of peolple there don't have that luxury. You need money to buy that expensive powder. Since they didn't have money they reduced the amount of powder they had to put in each bottle. If the baby didn't finish the bottle right away they didn't have a fridge to put it in. It would spoil and be covered in flies in minutes. Too expensive to throw away. Ah yes, and what about sterilizing the bottle?
Now, you think that maybe that endless post would mercifully come to its end by now, right? No, no such luck. Because husband hasn't finished to read the paper. Nope. So now comes a very small article, which really, in normal circumstances, I probably would have rolled my eyes and no more. Ah, but I'm fired up today. Here it is: " a NASA official insists that the crystal clear tapes from the Appollo mission of first man on the moon are not lost. They just don't know where they are." Ok, I said, chuckling, we all know what that means. Now comes the outrageous part: " most of these tapes have never been reviewed by anyone, even at NASA." " What?" ( yes I know I repeat myself a lot). " You are telling me that after spending billions after billions they don't even review the data??" Now I'm asking this: how would the world fare now if these billions had been put toward helping humanity instead of a silly little race which only goal was to plant a flag and do a silly little dance so that they could say: I'm first, I'm first like a first grader racing to be first in the line. Cause obviously it wasn't knowledge they were after.
Ok, now it's done. Yes I'm ending the post. Finally. And I promise not to read the paper anymore today and to stay clear of anyone with a newspaper in hand. Hopefully I'll post again today. A more pleasant post. Hopefully. And nobody better cross me today or it won't be pretty.
