fixing ourselves takes time

Last week CDC reported more than three million teens have an STD based on a study of girls ages 14 to 19 and nearly half of these girls were black with Hispanics following close behind. Today, Chicago Tribune reported that teens in Chicago do not have the facts on STD, sexual education and seem somewhat doomed in their understanding of how a condom works and no idea on prevention methods. Some of the unbelievable made by the teens were about plastic baggies in lieu of condoms, having sex while standing and bathing right after sex and using aluminum foil as a barrier. Who in a half-straight-left-mind would even entertain the idea of creating any type of friction against genitals with aluminum foil? 

I’m not surprised one bit that the kids are this mixed up and their lack of understanding shows in higher STD rates which will ultimately mean higher rates of HIV and teen-pregnancy. I’m surprised the numbers are not higher and if a countywide study was conducted I bet the numbers would indeed be much higher.

Something happened in late 2002 to the CDC’s website information with respect to HIV, STIs, condoms and their effectiveness. This goes right along with the rest of the bad science that the Bush administration has been using to ruin our democracy and run their demagoguery, which is what the political climate has felt like to me since that dreaded day he was sworn in.

Kids (and adults) are going to be infected with every kind of sexually transmitted disease in huge numbers thanks to the bad information that the Bush administration has regurgitated now for years. We also have the Pope to thank for completely mixing everything up. Families are also evidently still uncomfortable with clear and honest safe sex, protection and prevention conversations with their young ones.

Due to the bad information, just like the questioning of global weather changes and Bush’s apparent disconnection with the nation’s gas prices last week, the STD and HIV rates will be climbing while the Dow and NASDAQ plummet! The kids (and adults) have found their loophole just as all the other arms of government and religions have, except the kid’s loopholes (no pun intended) will harm them.

Just say no to sex is a joke and a more hilarious subject is abstaining from sex when every song, commercial, movie and cartoon is loaded with sexual innuendo. Do we think the kids are truly this gullible? My eight-year old niece asked my brother if her uncle was gay last week and my brother had to spell out g-a-y when reporting that factoid to me. Evidently, my niece is ready for an honest response to her query and instead the parents showed her that in the dictionary gay means happy! Problem?

Girls in school want to be cool, they don’t want to be geeks and nerds and neither do the boys. Their loophole is oral sex and anal sex. It’s been going on for years now and the kids are doing it because they do not feel they are lying to their parents, the religion or the society, and they’re not. If I were a kid today and my parent was uncomfortable talking about sex and my parent asked me if I was having sex I would answer “absolutely not!” and expect to pass a lie detector test. Since Bush and the Pope never talk about anal or oral sex then the only sex they could be talking about is traditional sex! They’ve both proclaimed it quite explicitly either by the CDC website or a declaration outside the papal window. And they can’t talk about sex that falls in the no-no area because Bush and the Pope are equally uncomfortable talking about sex.

The kids are having every type of sex, whether it is traditional, oral, and anal or all encompassing of the entire Kama Sutra. It won’t stop just because there’s a ten second message stating religious or moral values followed by hours of infamous females getting loaded and driving and becoming pregnant and hooking their way to a New York jazz lounge by way of Spitzer. The kids are way smarter than we think. The problem is; they are just kids. They do think they are invincible. And when they come down with the STD, the pregnancy or the positive HIV test, we have no idea how they will react, except they will not be prepared to deal with is effectively. And even the few that do act proactively may not know how many others were infected before and after their discovery.

The following quote is from http://webexhibits.org/bush/7.html

“A fact sheet on the CDC website that included information on proper condom use, the effectiveness of different types of condoms, and studies showing that condom education does not promote sexual activity was replaced in October 2002 with a document that emphasizes condom failure rates and the effectiveness of abstinence.⁴⁵ When a source inside the CDC questioned the actions, she was told that the changes were directed by Bush administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services”

Clearly, the nation’s youth (and the adults!) are in for a bumpy ride. With all the current messiness of politics, the mudslinging from one camp to the other in the race for the white house, the recession, the war, the real estate slump; who’s got time for frank and honest health and sexuality talk with the young ones? It’s a cliché but they are the future of America.    

 Ó 2008 Carlos A. Perez 

Just when you thought all you had to do was drink purified or bottled water maybe we should just drink the tap water and hope we ingest the drugs that we prefer. Chances are we’ll ingest way more pharmaceuticals that we want or need.

There are many methods to clean our tap water like purification, filtering and treatment with ozone or steam distillation but they don’t seem to break down these pharmaceuticals. I do not think any of these methods were created with the idea of removing man made chemicals with complicated molecular structures. I understand that reverse osmosis may be able to break down the pharmaceuticals but this is a very expensive water treatment technique and we know how much our culture and branches of the government enjoy spending money for our health. It’s quite evident that billions of dollars a day for water boarding seems acceptable but not for clean drinking water for our troops and citizens.

And just when I thought our water cleaning methods may treat chlorine, fluoride and maybe some traces of waste, it seems the chloride already added to our water to burn and scald our throats and sinuses or, as they say, to make it safer for us to consume, may combine with some of the pharmaceuticals in the water to make them more powerful and toxic! 

These drugs do not fully break down in our own bodies so why should a little H2O break them down. After processing by our liver and kidneys they still drip and pass through our systems and find their way back to the tap. However, if we drink water with trace amounts of pharmaceuticals these drugs will seep into our system through our gut before our body’s filtering techniques even get a fair chance at it. And yes, I understand that these are small, minute traces of the pharmaceuticals but if you drink the tap water every day and take Oprah’s advice and drink eight eight-ounce glasses a day and you do this for twenty or more years; don’t you think when your doctor says you may have some strange abnormality that it may mean you are overloaded with pharmaceuticals that were never prescribed for you?

No wonder so many people say that drinking a glass of water by itself may cure a headache! Sure, chances are you may luck out and get some water with traces of Vicodin or Rush’s fave; Oxycotin. That will make you forget you ever had a headache! But what if I want water for a headache and I don’t luck out and get water laced with progesterone? I like my deep manly voice and the hair on my legs.

 Sometimes I wonder if we have progressed at all. Seems to me that the ancient societies that were dying from drinking bad water were onto something when they created wine and other fermented beverages.  

Life is short. I’m moving near San Francisco; an article mentioned a ‘sex hormone’ was detected in their tap water. I don’t like to purposefully take drugs but if I’m going to drink them anyway and there’s not much I can do about it; I’m moving near Frisco! This way, I can ingest a little Human Growth Hormone, Testosterone, Deca-Durabolin and a little Ecstasy and Crystal-Meth. Might as well have fun with it!

Oh, grow up!

Ó 2008 Carlos A. Perez 

I remember years ago the idea came about that we would not need terrorists to terrorize us. This idea started before nine eleven and it certainly solidified itself after this tragic date. For a little while there it seemed that the adults anxiety level was high enough for them to go over the edge. I remember the many stories of the man, woman or couple that lost it and killed their family or held people hostage or some other bizarre behavior that we usually cannot figure out because they wind up offing themselves. To a smaller degree the adults are still at it.

Now it’s the kids. Why have the kids turned terrorists?

In 1962 MIT brains came up with Spacewar, the first video game and although crude and prehistoric, compared with today’s virtually real games, violent they still were. The whole point was to shoot down another ship, and then you got points. If the first video game was about planting trees in a decimated area of the Amazon’s rainforest and you got points for every sampling that grew…. YAWN!

For the last two decades the video games have such purposeful point accumulation systems like how many cops and whores can you kill. Now that seems like perfectly safe and sane entertainment right? Even the parents that also enjoy these games show the side effect of the games when they have brawls and catfights with each other over who snatched up the last game box at the retailer.

And we don’t expect the kids to become affected?

There is a debate between Hollywood and TV producers who face the dilemma of how to depict violence without exploiting it. Give me a killin’ break! It’s simple, you selfish, greedy, I’ll-do-anything-for-ratings-and-box-office-revenue-executives: DON’T show it! It is no secret that what the mind can craft up on its own can be far more gruesome or terrifying than what TV and Hollywood can dramatize through computer animation and today’s seemingly real blood and guts.

The first Halloween movie was the blockbuster hit that it was because in many scenes we knew exactly what was about to happen but we didn’t necessarily have to see it drop by bloody drop. Some lunatic psycho was going to chop up a teenager right after he and she finished smoking reefer and began to have sex. The original Halloween hardly showed the gory violence that its successors showed. Recently we’ve seen a rash of sadistically torturous flicks like Saw I, II, III, oh hell, I forget how many there are. I don’t need to point out how many movies have been recently released that have no real scary merit. They are merely a quick set up for nearly two hours of non-stop cutting, sawing, and shots of slow penetration of various objects into various parts of the body.

So should we be surprised that every day now there’s a shooting at a school? We were almost used to the killings right in our backyards involving American nuclear families and…boom! Now it’s a daily news sound bite at the nearby school. These kids are also medicated. The shooters all seem to be on a cocktail of ‘selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors,’ drugs like Prozac, Zoloft and Wellbutrin. I’ve noticed that they also seem to be taking Ambien.  Maybe Ambien is the sleep medication du jour and therefore more people seem to be taking it, but its side effects are clearly posted everywhere and some of the more scary ones are: temporary amnesia, drug dependence, aggressive behavior, confusion, agitation, depression and suicidal thoughts.

My favorite is suicidal thoughts. Suicidal thoughts are a side effect of just about every psychotropic medication available! Should we really be surprised that the kids have lost their equilibrium along with the rest of society? They have grown up in a world where one on one communication is unheard of. Instead, communication by every other cold and electronic means is the norm. Their social life is on the Internet and nowhere near the school, the playground or their neighborhood. The closest they get to a neighborhood is the mall where they can buy labels, junk food, and watch more violent movies while ingesting the junk.

Drugs are a necessary evil to combat a worse evil because every now and then an infection will not stop until the right drug kills it. However, I recently read that Nexium has been approved, by the FDA of course, for children aged one to eleven years of age for heartburn. A one year old, with heartburn? What’s in that mother’s breast milk? Or what’s in the infant formula? I overheard a triage nurse recently advise the parents of a toddler to stop feeding the cola since the child had been vomiting on an hourly basis.

I understand that there is hardly any art, music or physical education taught in the schools but we better figure out a way to teach young people a thing or two about biology. Not how to slice open a frog and look for eggs and declare; “I got the female!” But how biology, drugs and foods work inside the human body. And how foods can wind up acting just like drugs. Can we say sugar, aspartame and high fructose corn syrup? Oh, but wait, we don’t need to do that; the government and the FDA are looking out for all of us…right? We know the answer to that last bit of sarcasm, but the kids don’t know the difference. They grow up with their siblings being medicated my mommy and daddy. They see mom and dad medicating themselves and they see them using alcohol. I won’t even go into the drugs of the dark side.  

The kids are now desensitized to pain. They can’t feel anything! And you can’t say they didn’t warn us because we went through a decade where they purposefully burned, cut and mutilated themselves in front of their parents and peers to prove it. We also cannot put this responsibility on the parents, after all, they either must work more than one job to barely support the home or they are paid so much that there is the disconnect of the wealthy and intellectual that has a nanny for each DNA copy. Maybe someone will pay attention to the no child left behind idea and really pay attention to the kids. Some of the kids that warned us during the 80s by self-mutilation are now grown up and have their own kids, which they have also medicated because it’s all they’ve ever known.

Whew! I am so wound up from writing this I think I will take a Prozac to take off the anxiety, maybe swallow that with a martini and if I’m not feeling better in an hour, I might take a Cymbalta. If I’m still edgy I will need some sleep so I’ll take a Lunesta and go to bed since I have at least eight hours I can devote to sleep. And don’t worry, if I have a suicidal thought or think about chopping up my supervisor’s head, I will do what all the patient information booklets and commercials say. I will immediately call my doctor. Oh, but wait, my doctor never answers the phone. And the first thing the doctor’s recording tells you is “if this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. 911…we pay extra for that service now on so many levels don’t we?

  Ó 2008 Carlos A. Perez