Cherry

I bought some cherries at the farmer's market on Sunday.  I looked around, since the ones I saw were expensive, $8 for a large pint, and it seemed to be they were less last year.  I went to the youngish guy with the tattoos who has fruit that seems actually organic - bug spots, smaller, riper.  He usually has deals, and if the scale is on your side he'll throw a couple of extra plums in to even out the bunch.  He said, "Sorry, season's over. It was a short one this year." I bought some from the one kiosk selling them, and the older farmer said it was probably the last week. They wouldn't have anymore.

I started thinking about our food supply.  Dying bees, droughts, things we take for granted can just disappear.  Industrial farming has taken a lot of the nutrients out of our food, so even when we're trying to eat healthily, a lot of what we buy is tainted or shiny in presentation but empty of nutrients. It's tempting to make a jab at are culture, that our food is an analog to it, but that's too easy.  I worry we won't have enough one day. It is happening other places.  Money can only get you so much. I couldn't find organic apples for months, and I was told it was just a bad year.  The non-organic, shiny, non-nutritive ones that you're not supposed to eat because they are sponges for pesticides were plentiful.

I was at the gym, and saw pictures of Isis in Iraq, taking over cities. I've become so cynical it would not surprise me if Dick Cheney and Haliburton we're funding them, as he seems to go to any length to try and blame things on Obama, and I read the other day that Haliburton profited something like $137 billion dollars from the war in Iraq.  A war he started, and is now trying to hang on someone else.  He is pure evil.

I worry that the rhetoric he and other conservatives spew about guns, about freedom, somehow equating the idea that guns keep America free while every day another child or another innocent bystander dies from some idiot with a gun, will cause these people to mobilize under some religious banner and turn us into a terrifying theocracy. I typed theocrazy by accident, and that may be more apt. I always want to tell religious nuts to go and live in an actual theocracy for a year, and if they survive, come back and tell us how free it felt to them.

I heard a story on the news this weekend about the slums in Brazil, how outside an expensive new stadium, people are living in a city that must be traversed by boards above still flooded waters, filled with dog excrement and refuse, which causes sickness and death - especially young children.  Millions spent for the world to watch grown men play a game for entertainment, while people die around the corner. We do like to distract ourselves.

I need to look for some more uplifting stories. Maybe we're not meant to know what 7 billion people are doing at every moment of every day. It doesn't effect our day to day lives. I draw incorrect conclusions from history, and at times it seems dark.  It doesn't always go that way, though, does it?  There's still hope we can fix our food, feed people, have enough water, solve our murdering each other in the streets and ignoring the suffering for the sake of a good time, right? Lighten up, I hear someone say. It's only a game.  And it is. Only a game.

I picked up a few different quarts of cherries to see which was the best. The woman at the kiosk assented to my choice, and as she dumped the cherries into a bag there didn't seem to be as many as when they were packed together.  I am savoring each cherry.