Many comedians joke about how so many places asks us not to have anything that even smells like peanuts because someone there is fatally allergic to peanuts. Even the sight of a peanut could put some of them into a coma.
Putting such comedy routines aside, what has changed? Seriously.
It is true that this situation did not seem to exist in the 1980s. Every kid ate peanuts. Parents packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school lunches, after school snacks were often peanut butter crackers, the government gave away peanut butter to poor families in need of food. It was touted as a wonder food that is versatile, tasty and nutritious. Even the staple free snack on airplane flights was the “little bag of peanuts”.
Today: If a flight attendant, teacher, secretary, med tech even hear the word “peanut” , there’s a risk of an immediate shut down, quarantine and hazmat suits.
So, back to my question: What changed?
If so many more people are so deathly allergic to peanuts, what caused it? Why are we so panicked that we’ll smack a PBJ from someone’s hands instead of tracking down what has caused so many killer allergies to infect so many more people in the first place?
We’ve all heard the yells for caution against mindlessly killing a hapless stranger with the presence of food: peanuts, eggs, milk, soybeans, wheat, tree nuts, strawberries, and the list goes on. It’s why gallons of milk are labeled with warnings: “Caution! May contain milk.” It damn well better.
These deadly allergies used to be rare; now they seem to be everywhere. Something has changed.
I don’t necessarily mean the Mandela Effect is at play here, but maybe. I suspect it’s something else, something corporations or governments are working hard to keep it under wraps or are oblivious to it. So, it becomes a conspiracy guessing game:
- Mandatory drinking water additives
- Forever chemicals seeping into everything
- Unnatural chemicals used to make frying pans “non-stick”
- So many drugs injected into livestock
- Bio-engineered plants
- Dyes and man-made chemical compounds in kids “snacks”
- Pesticides used on our fruits and vegetables
- Manufactured microplastics in every human on the planet
- Undesirable chemicals released into our atmosphere
- More aggressive mining and drilling releasing new toxins into our environment
- Big Sugar’s plot to take down Big Peanut in a vie for the Snack King thrown
Or, hear me out, is it wealth inequality? Has the growing gap between the rich and the poor created so much stress and panic that it’s weakening human physiology, giving a rise to more people with deadly allergies, even embryos growing inside stressed mothers. The wealth gap has increased so much that poor parents have to work multiple jobs just to keep food on a table and a roof over it, scared that they’re just one bill from being homeless. So many hourly jobs won’t even pay the minimum wage if they can get away with it, and they won’t even guarantee 40 hours. Some will only offer less, like 20 hours, to prevent the owner or corporation from being required by law to provide benefits like health care, parental leave and retirement accounts.
Meanwhile, Corporations are buying houses, ratcheting up prices and only offering high rents. Grifters are training others in house-flipping, which causes entire neighborhoods to balloon in prices, so now young families don’t have a chance of owning a safe, stable shelter. Instead, greed is enticing trailer park and apartment complex owners into kicking everyone to the street so they can bribe officials to rezone the plot so they can sell it for millions. Maybe they’ll build a nice country club. They don’t care if their actions hurt or lead to the death of other people; it’s legal after all.
Greed. Greed of all kinds, from all sides, is placing mountains of stress on people who are working themselves to death for just one more meal.
Do the rich need so much money to justify treating the people working for them like nothing more than lazy slaves, who will accept mistreatment if you entice them with the idea of making even one more penny an hour? “Good business” is never “moral business.” This environment is critically unhealthy. Manifestations from this will only cause increases in unhealthy people.
Could this trigger a rise in deadly allergies, cancers, organ failures, mental health problems? I, for one, say absolutely. And no one in power cares. Caring costs money and social capital within the “rich club”. The rich are so far detached they can’t even imagine life with only two cars when so many can’t afford even one car because it would mean they’ll starve and die.
What the rich and powerful always forget is that while they may have everything they need or want and never have to face true starvation, the public, the masses, always have one thing the rich don’t have: the guillotine.
Eventually the masses will snap and dethrone the powerful. They have time and time again; they will again. Therefore, the rich fear the masses, leading them to demean the public because doing so calms their fear and keeps the serfs in their place. And they sure as shooting don’t want the masses to know that all the damage the rich have done to our world so they can make more money is killing us, one deadly allergy/cancer/virus/suicide at a time.
After all, let the poor die; they’ll just make more, more who will work harder for less.