Mitch: Sorry, your seatbelt seems to be broken. What do you recommend I do?
Cab Driver: I recommend you stop being such a faggot. You're in the backseat.
For all users of anti-bacterial lotions and creams and soaps and lets-all-be-afraid of the icky-icky-world-around-us people...
Just stop it. You're screwing it up for everybody.
You big, fat pile of bacteria / Go ahead, roll in it. Revel in it. You're made of it. What, you prefer a meek, sterile world?:
"...these bacteria, is/are vital and essential to our survival, the cultural mind-set at large runs directly opposite. So much so that we could be, in effect, cleaning and scrubbing and protecting ourselves to death, as our immune systems whimper and wither and drug-resistant bacteria get nastier and nature always, always finds a way to thwart our silly efforts to eradicate its wild side.
Hell, just look at the ads, the obnoxious articles, the insidious marketing, the cleaning solvent aisle at the supermarket, all screaming the same shrill one-note alarm (and all, by the way, apparently aimed straight at the same sad demographic: frumpy paranoid moms with too many kids and too little time to actually, you know, read): Bacteria is bad! Germs are evil! Don't touch that doorknob! If you consider yourself a good parent, if you love your kids, you must scrub every surface and sanitize every toilet and wash your hands 12 times an hour and oh my God don't ever ever ever let your kids eat something from the floor or the table or the backyard garden because what are you, insane?
Yes, obviously, it's just more fear-based B.S. for a fear-based culture, right?
...Tract homes. Cruise ships. Gated communities. Giant, vacuum-sealed malls. Swimming pools with no deep ends. Swimming pools built 50 yards from the warm, dangerous ocean in Hawaii. Theme restaurants. Theme hotels. Theme vacations. Theme nature. Second Life. Megachurches. Groupthink. Intellectual numbness. Spiritual stasis. Rubber gloves. Face masks. Body condoms. Processed foods. Bans on raw milk. Quadruple-washed lettuce. Spitting instead of swallowing. Entire islands and towns built and owned and operated by the Walt Disney Company.
And then, wider: Fear of your own body. Fear of sex, blood, bodily fluids, human contact. Fear of pain, aging, death. Fear of nature. Fear of the new. Fear of the different, the strange, the foreign, the Other...
The trend is palpable, obvious, sad. We seem to be all too happy to have as much raw human experience filed down to a safe nub as possible, all contingencies taken care of and all bacteria scrubbed away and all dangers bleached out and not a single thing left to chance because oh my God what if something went wrong?"
Why Americans should eat more excrement. - By Kent Sepkowitz - Slate Magazine:
"But here is the problem: We have become victims of our own success. Ever wonder why your dog can gobble, lick, and gnaw all he wants along the glorious buffet of a city street and (almost) never get sick? Your dog is used to eating shit. Americans, on the other hand, grow up eating almost no shit at all. Our food is hosed and boiled and rinsed and detoxified and frozen and salted and preserved. Recently, we have begun to irradiate it, too—just in case. As a result, when our bodies encounter the occasional inevitable bug, they're unhappy. Our centuries-long program of winnowing out all the muck has turned us into sissies and withered the substantial part of the immune system mediated by our intestinal tract."
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