A Brooklyn mother unable to nurse fed her child donated breast milk. The $70 billion infant formula industry has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years.
Credit: James Estrin/The New York Times
A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.
Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
When that failed, they turned to threats, according […]
Life brings changes, causes adjustments, setbacks. It does and maybe it must. We know that we have to expect tragedy, and deal with the horrors which at times come down.
But to have to helplessly watch as the essence of the structure, government, created to guide and to benefit the welfare of all, instead is used for the wrecking of good and of our hopes, despoiling the fruits of many dedicated lives – and this flowing from a staggering gluttonous resolve to keep throwing millions, billions, trillions at obscenely engorged multi-corporations..
It hurts the heart & mind and injures the spirit.
Humankind always has had a viscious, self-gratifying and abusive quality in its nature. Throughout the timeline of hominids it has been there. This is the bloody darkness in our collective psyche. Yet steadily and from the mid-20th century especially, there seemed to have been a light of higher ideas & ideals taking hold & raising up the functioning of our society and government, raising up the overall consciousness of our individual and collective being.
Now it feels particularly crushing seeing such unchecked, vicious avarice back and controlling critical events.
The barbaric horde of destructive forces aren’t overwhelming our borders, aren’t at our gates.
The rot of deep evil is at our societal center, within us.
Ruin daily seems more uncheckable and more imminent. Is it past a point to adjust this.. to find a new center and re-put our steps onto a better path?
I am certainly dazed and disheartened. We can’t on one hand be stagnant, inattentive or dismissive. Yet neither can we hope to overcome the rampant evil if our own personal centers, our consciousness and actions, get completely subsumed by the anger and the repugnance that we naturally feel, must feel.
We have to do more than just ‘turn the other cheek’ and keep watching the steady destructions of good. But neither can the tools of fear and darkness be in our hands. Nor especially in our hearts.
Can we act? Effectively, rapidly, and with agility?
Giles, I have to say that is the most brilliant statement of our current times that I have read. I applaud you for the elegance of the statement and agree with great sympathy for your understanding of our predicament. I applaud you, and join you in hope that we can come together in the rapid dismantling of the current inequity within our psyche, and replace it with a contemplating, meditating, and empathic replacement.
Thank you sir.
I sat with and pondered this new abhorrent action by our government, looking for words.
I deeply hope there is a path of light through this time. This fearful time which somehow too many are anesthetized to.
I am touched and honored by your words. I do hope we can persevere.
Thankfully Stephan is holding up a mirror to the truth, daily.
Thanks to all 3 of you: it is heartening to feel the energy of solidarity amidst & facing this inner cruelty, may we prevail
Rev. Dean, I found these words and think they apply to our conversation. I feel that you may, like me, find them stirring:
“Peace is not just about the absence of conflict; it is also about the presence of justice.
Martin Luther King Jr., even distinguished between ‘the devil’s peace’ and God’s true peace. …
But true peace does not exist until there is justice, restoration, forgiveness.
•Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice• “
from the book
“Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals”
by Shane Claiborne
.
I agree with all of you and want to remind you that this did not happen overnight or in one election cycle. Things/life in our system has been rotting for some time now it is just with trumpco the evil stupidity is on full and unhindered display. It seems what ever aspect of governance that “worked” or was attempting a positive contribution is now being wrecked.
As a left leaning sort it is amazing that the FBI could became a victim perhaps deserving of compassion- I said perhaps. Meanwhile the Pentagon under Mattis is the one area of relative saneness and stability in this clown show. The pentagon, mind you the biggest money sinkhole in the world many times over.
When one thinks it couldn’t get worse it does. Really children in concentration camps separated from parents in other concentration camps and many americans find that of no or not too much concern. Three weeks go by and we are consumed by a story about boys in a cave in Thailand, great loving story by the way, but remember the kids who the government can’t unite with their parents because they don’t know who is who or where who is. This more than anything else lays bare the rot that permeates my country driven by profit over all else. And you know what the vast majority of us are not like this at all but some how we are in the thrall of the mind numbing chaos and stupidity.
It breaks my heart as I see this beautiful planet with wonderous and varied lifeforms being rapidly destroyed by our mind numbing unconscious pursuit of I know not what. The environmental tipping point is long since past and we and future generations will have pull together if humans are survive into the 22nd century. Then I have accused of being far too negative…
Well said Will.
The last part particularly worries me. I know people who are clearly & rather deeply concerned, but who also want to diminish this and say, “every older generation always thinks the world is going to hell.”
I’m not nearly sanguine with that thought.