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Letter To Ashoka And To Bill Gates
Re: Solving AIDS In
Africa
by Harold Kulungian
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PART III. Dear Ms.
Kidder:
I've decided to add this third installment to my letter, in
order to address some further related health issues that are global in scope,
and to add substance to my diagnosis of the AIDS Crisis, not only in
sub-Saharan Africa, but in the USA and worldwide.
First I should answer
the obvious question: "How do you know that your diagnosis, that AIDS is due to
a phlegmatic condition caused by the inability to keep one's skin dry in a hot,
humid sub-Saharan climate, while wearing non-absorbent synthetic clothes,
footwear, bedding, home furnishings?"
The fact that AIDS is not a major
problem in Northern Africa and in the Sahara Desert, where the air is dry, is
the first clue. Even without wearing any clothes at all--if that was an
option--it would be healthier than wearing petroleum-based garments that
prevent the dry air from evaporating the moisture off one's skin.
But it
is not only a matter of keeping one's skin dry: In order to metabolize our food
effectively and completely, we need to conserve our body heat, in a humid
climate as well as in a drier climate.
Let me give an example from
closer home, what is happening here in the USA, especially among the elderly
and among very young children, persons who don't have sufficient physical
activity to help them digest their food completely.
Yesterday I was
visiting a local nursing home, where a friend is temporarily, after having
fallen and broken his pelvis. Two days earlier he had complained that he felt
numbness in his foot, on the side where he had undergone surgery on his hip. He
was wearing very light-weight polyester pajamas, furnished by the nursing home,
in the midst of a New England winter with snow piled up outside his
window.
I knew he wasn't dressed adequately, but he insisted he was ok.
Apparently his condition worsened, so he telephoned his son to bring him his
heavy woolen pants, made in So. Korea, his native land, and his cotton shirt
and wool sweater.
Well, when I saw him again 2 days later, now dressed
adequately for the season, he was a new man, rapidly on the mend and smiling
from ear to ear.
The other person who shares his room is a 91-year old
man, who has obviously worked hard at physical labor all his life, is always
up, sitting in his chair, but who cannot walk around without fear of falling.
Why? What is his problem, I asked myself? He has nothing organically wrong with
him, no disease.
Just by casting a glance around his area, I could see
the answer, due to my many years of observations of what our artificial
lifestyle based on synthetics is doing to people. Beside his TV was a bottle of
Planter's Peanuts, almost gone. Evidently Charlie likes peanuts, as who
wouldn't, if you had to survive on that skimpy, pasty institutional food, junk
food, served by the Nursing Home 3 times daily.
But what was Charlie
wearing and sleeping under, to enable him to digest the heavy fat and protein
in the peanuts? He wears a green sweatshirt, 50/50 polyester and cotton. His
pants are very lightweight polyester, his socks likewise, and his shoes are
synthetic junk materials. God knows what quality his underwear is; but his
bedding is all synthetic! There is not one item of natural organic material
with a cellular structure in his room, with which he can make contact for
comfort and transpiration of body wastes through his skin!
So, Charlie's
nose is bulbous and red: there's the peanut oil and fat and protein which he
cannot efficiently digest by sending it downwards out of his body. The whites
of his eyes aren't white, for the same reason: his body is polluted by dietary
waste products that he cannot metabolize. So it is a steady process of
biological deterioration for any person who is dressed inadequately to digest
his food well.
He is one among many millions going the same route, a way
of death that has been accelerating for the past half century, since our
civilization started converting the material bases of our lives into junk
materials that cannot enable the human body to metabolize and transpire its
dietary wastes into what surrounds us.
Now I jump from this example of
an elderly man who is fed inadequately, clothed inadequately, and bedded amidst
polyester sheets and coverlet--to the global health scene in which heart
disease is predicted to be the #1 killer worldwide by 2020.
The
physiological problem of clothing human beings in petroleum has never been
taken any notice of by the medical profession, or by any other social
scientists or philosophers. Yet, clearly, this technological revolution in the
way people are clothed has been going on at an accelerating pace since the end
of World War II. And there is no other comparable revolution in the human way
of life since civilization began that can compare with this conversion from
organic to inorganic, non-cellular materials as the basis of daily
life.
Just walk through the Women's Lingerie department of J. C. PENNEY
or any other department store! You find yourself in a sea of petroleum
products, hanging enticingly on racks: 100% nylon panties, bras, support
garments, pantyhose of 100% petroleum that cover most of a woman's body,
together with her other undergarments, none of which can absorb the waste
products from her skin and keep it dry and breathing.
The saleslady in
J. C. Penney tells me that the nylon bras sell more than the part cotton or
wholly cotton bras, because "women find that they fit better." Nylon being
free-flowing petroleum, it takes the shape of the body readily. But that means
that women cannot transpire through their skin in the entire lower half, and
more, of their body.
Thus their dietary waste products can find no way
out of their pores; so the mucus must rise and become deposited in the breasts,
where it eventually hardens into cancerous deposits, because it cannot be
excreted from the breasts either, not into nylon bras. The statistics on breast
cancer in the USA doubled in a ten year period, 1965-75, after American women
had switched over to synthetic hose and undergarments. The correlation is right
there, since it takes a good ten years or more of unhealthy lifestyle to
develop tumors.
If we look in the pages of National Geographic magazine,
we see the Western-made junk shoes and clothing being worn from the jungles of
Africa to the mountains of Tibet. Indeed, the professional mountaineers who
climb Mt. Everest are now doing so in polyester clothes, mittens and even
synthetic shoes! If they have to spend the night on the mountain without
getting back to their heated tents, they are doomed! Their hands and feet
become frostbitten and have to be amputated. Or they simply die out in the
cold. In former years, wearing wool, fur, and leather, they could survive an
overnight without the heated shelter of a tent. No longer. Yet they insist that
the revolution to lightweight synthetics is "progress".
So everywhere we
look, we see the new ideology that man-made materials are lighter weight and
superior to natural materials--we see that false belief taking a heavy toll of
human lives all around the planet. The other topic I want to address is: "What
should philanthropy be doing to alleviate the sickness, suffering, and needless
deaths due to inadequate clothing?" In the U.S. all our uniformed personnel are
dressed in synthetic clothes: the military, the police, postal workers,
firemen, airline pilots and stewardesses, and every sort of blue-collar worker
is dressed in petroleum clothing.
Is it any wonder that ordinary people
no longer have the energy to perform their duties up to par, and that standards
in every walk of life--education, art, athletics, morals, mental and sexual
functioning--everywhere the standards are being dumbed down relentlessly. They
have to be--because people just cannot perform even minimally while wearing
junk clothes, footwear, undergarments, etc.
When I travel, I always take
a woolen blanket and cotton sheets with me, because they have long disappeared
from public facilities and private homes as well.
So we come to the huge
moral issue which the MEDICAL REVOLUTION TO INTERNAL HYGIENE would have to
face. Could ASHOKA, could the BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION, announce--on
the basis of scientific experiments--that our modern lifestyle, based on
nonabsorbent synthetic materials, is the biggest enemy of health?
Could
Bill Gates, instead of giving 100 million dollars for drug research--which
would do absolutely nothing to solve the unhygienic conditions that produce
AIDS--give 100 million to import 100% cotton, linen, and woolen garments,
blankets, etc. into the sub-Saharan countries where AIDS is taking the heaviest
toll in the heat and humidity which is so favorable to propagation of the
virus?
The cottage industries whereby the Africans formerly wove their
own garments would need to be rebuilt and fostered. The African governments
would need to promulgate laws forbidding the importation of Western-made
synthetic clothes and bedding. And that is exactly the true statesman's
responsibility, according to Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902), the greatest German
doctor of the 19th century.
Virchow was repeatedly called upon by the
German government to investigate the latest outbreaks of epidemic diseases.
What he wrote famously is that true statesmanship is in seeing how the way of
life of one's people has been altered, causing these epidemic diseases, so that
it can be put right, to restore the health of the population.
Well, the
technological changes of the past century have destroyed the natural bases of a
healthy life--natural food, natural clothing, natural building materials and
home furnishings. Can these be put right again? Economically, for the
civilization as a whole, undoubtedly not. How could the economy be converted
from unnatural back to natural materials? Could enough cotton, wool, linen,
leather, wood, etc. be produced again as it was formerly when those materials
were the indispensable bases of life?
The answer is: Civilization most
likely cannot be turned back to the natural way of life. Which means that the
steady deterioration of health and happiness for entire peoples cannot be
arrested, but perhaps only slowed somewhat by public education that impugns our
unhealthy synthetic, artificial way of life.
But individuals, families,
and even entire communities can learn how to take responsibility for their
health, and extricate themselves from our modern pathogenic
lifestyle.
In closing, I send you the Web site of the Macrobiotic
community, which calls itself "IONIA", after the ancient community in Asis
Minor of that name. Please look at the children and adults pictured there on
the land in Kasilof, Alaska 99610, tel. (907) 262-2824. This Macrobiotic
community represents a beautiful inspiration of hard work, which has created
what can only be marveled at: http://www.ionia.org.
[CONTINUED WITH PART
IV] |
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EAT
YOUR WAY TO HEALTH
Harold Kulungian