A Fact of Life:  All life feeds on other life forms, and is preyed upon by other life forms.  Survival of every living thing involves unceasing effort.  Everyone has noticed this among animals and plants.  Among humans it is easy to observe that in the effort to "make a living," people take every opportunity to obtain their needs and desires, real or fancied, by exploiting other people and other life forms, spoiling earth's natural resources, and generally scrambling for what they want.  People also band together in various kinds of groups - governments, corporations, religions, guilds, trade unions, medical associations, etc. - to gain more "clout" for obtaining their desires and for beating the competition.

    But humans don't stop there.  Many humans prey on, kill or exploit other life forms just for the fun of it, and call it sport.  Killing for food is far different from killing for pleasure.  There is no predator more dangerous than humanity.

    As a result, it is not safe to rest for long.  Just when you think you have won a battle for freedom, some other situation or group arises to take it away from you, or perhaps exploit you in some other way, usually for monetary profit.  Freedom in the United States is under serious attack, and much of our freedom is already lost.

     A Spiritual Teacher has written: "These fleas have other fleas to bite 'em, and those have fleas, ad infinitum."  In the other direction, we at the top of the heap have microbes, parasites, viruses and other humans preying upon us.

Life in These United States: 

   Because of this fact of incessant competition, we must be vigilant and ready to resist all efforts to enslave us or otherwise take away our freedoms.  Like it or not, we have to expend a rather large portion of our energy and attention to foil those who would exploit us while we aren't watching.

    Probably the greatest threat to our freedom in the United States is the threat to health freedom - the freedom to obtain and use natural foods (not "monkeyed with" by genetic engineering or denatured or mildly poisoned to prolong shelf life) and the freedom to use new or ancient means to treat illness when those means are not recognized by the medical associations in this country even though they may be in common use in other countries.

    One of the jobs of our Government is to protect us, but the Government makes laws and regulations under pressure of special interest groups.  I have read that the largest lobbying group in Washington is the medical lobby.  The medical community has maneuvered itself into a position of great power, backed by the pharmaceutical houses.  The pharmaceutical houses are the most profitable industry in America.  I wish everyone who visits this web would obtain a copy of the Jan/Feb 2001 issue of Health Freedom News (see National Health Federation on main page) and read about the drug industry's "$125 Billion Roll," projected to be $243 billion by 2008, and our Government leaders are personally cashing in on it.  Illegal drug trade is practically nothing compared to this business, and much of our "medicine" is over-priced and not very helpful.  Notice that current magazine advertisements for these drugs require more space than the ad itself to tell about the dangers of the product.  A lot of it is so dangerous that it may be worse than the illness.  The closing words of an editorial in the magazine read: "Indeed, those nasty folks in the Colombian, Asian and Mexican cocaine cartels - purveyors of 'illicit' drugs - are, profit-wise, absolute pikers alongside the purveyors of those 'licit' drugs which so control Western medicine.  It's Premarin - not cocaine - where the real action is."

Taken from a recent report from Food&WaterWatch, here are two examples of what we're dealing with: "(1) Although mad cow disease presents a lethal threat, the USDA has failed to implement essential safety and inspection procedures, and has blocked meat-packers from implementing their own mad cow testing programs.  (2) Instead of forcing meat producers to fix serious sanitation problems at factory farms and slaughter houses, the federal Government allows them to take dangerous shortcuts like pumping livestock full of antibiotics, dipping carcasses in toxic disinfectants, and irradiating meat."  I urge all readers to visit and support www.foodandwaterwatch.org.  See my Health Notes page for a related report by Howard Lyman.