Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

This book is truly something. Paul Farmer, raised without the ideals of the American dream, is one of the very few people in this world and mostly in this country, who truly cares about the world and is actively trying to make it a better place. Here is a man who will risk his life to do justice to a people whose livelihood America completely destroyed.  Farmer doesn’t care about anything but humanity, and helping it in this helter-skelter world.  

I think if you asked Kidder, in an elevator to sum up the book, you’d probably get an earful and end up at a diner drinking coffees and discussing a whole slew of practices of today’s world that are truly horrifying. But here it is not really Kidder who struck my sever intrigue, but Farmer, whom I’d love to sit down and talk with. His interesting and uncommon childhood made him a particularly wonderful man.

“As Farmer was leaving the shelter he heard Joe say to another resident just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant for him to overhear, ‘That guys a fuckin’ saint’ it wasn’t the first time that Farmer had heard himself called that, when I asked him his reaction he said…’I don’t care how often people say you’re a saint, its to that I mind it, its that its inaccurate’ this was seemly I thought, resisting the edification. But then he told me’ people call me a saint, and than I think, I have to work harder, because a saint would be a great thing to be.’ I felt a small inner disturbance. It wasn’t that the words seemed immodest, I felt I was in the presence of a different person from the one id been chatting with a moment ago. Someone whose ambitions I hadn't yet begun to fathom.”

I think this book spoke to me so much because it’s exactly the kind of thing I want to do with my life. I want to be a writer, but above that I want to be like Farmer. He had great opportunities in his life and he saw great injustices across the world. He used his privilege to help people of Haiti who are completely un-self-sufficient because of things America did for its greed. He gave people there a second chance and a new life and he did it with great sacrifices on his own part, because he understands that that’s what it takes to make a difference. He didn’t do it for monetary gain; he did it for universal gain, and knowledge and wisdom. I don’t know about being a doctor, and saving people everywhere, but I want to do something like that for the earth. An earth mostly destroyed by America, that we are all part of, and that by poisoning and killing our planet we in affect are doing just that to ourselves. You cant save people in a world that is dying. 

HW 19

Everyone wants to be healthy, weather its most important to you or not. Even if you don’t take great or even good care of your body, it’s a natural human instinct to keep healthy. The dominant social practices around illness and dying in America subdue this instinct into a consumerist coma.

I remember running around the isles in the health food store with my sister as a little kid. And today I take care of my self in even more wholistic ways. My mom is as always a huge fan of homeopathic remedies, herbal teas, vitamins, and sleeps, taught me these ways from the beginning. As I grew older and began to take care of my self I kept that natural health ways I had learned and also expanded on them ever more, with yoga and meditation.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time in hospitals and with doctors, burses, and other sick children, I am very appreciative of medical advances that have been made. With out them I might be alive today and I certainly would not look the way I do. Sometimes science does have the answers. But it will never have them all. In my opinion a wholistic way of being healthy is the best way to stay in touch with the earth, your soul, and the sprit world, and being in touch there is the best way to stay healthy and avoid illness. While antibiotics can cure your cold, emanation and yoga could keep you from ever even getting that cold.  Threes a scientific cure for almost everything, but why would you want to bring your body even further form nature. Well, that’s just not natural!

I am medical-breakthroughs. Everyone diagnosed with an AVM (Arteriole-venous malformation) before or in the same year as me, is dead.  I don’t think ill ever know for sure but maybe it was my wholistic upbringing that saved me, or my contact with the spirit world. Ill never knows, but ill continues to live this way and hope I continue making breakthroughs. Over the years I have watched the treatment methods get better. But science still has no answer for me. Im not saying im a religious person at all, but in my soul I know I will be all right.

About three years ago my grandpa sustained brain damage. The doctors told us if we took him off the feeding tubes he wouldn’t last the week. Everyone knew he didn’t want to live like that, and no one wanted to subject him to that kind of pseudo-life.  We decided to bring him home. Not only did he live the week, he lived for almost two more years. When he got home, he got better. He was able to join us at the dinner table, and even if he could barely remember out names, he could still brighten our days, and we his.

I remember in the weeks before he dies, all he could talk about was going home. His usually mostly incoherent and constant talking began to feature his mother, and lost war comrades. My grandpa slowly began to slip away into the world of the dead, and just like that, he was gone. 

HW 18

This thanksgiving was a hard one for my family. We have had two deaths in the last three years and my uncle just died so no one was really in the thankful celebratory mood. (Besides the idea of thanksgiving sickens me anyway, just be thankful on this one day and than for the rest of the year you can go back to your self absorbed ways. a holiday for the neocolonialist capitalist imperialist motherfuckers. being thankful on this day they invaded a land of prosper stole all of their resources and virgins with advanced weaponry killed them all off put the remaining few on reservations with no options and took claim of their land and distorted it in every way they were against.) But I digress. 

This thanksgiving was a rather odd one for me. Seeing as I am thankful for very little, and seeing as I no longer eat tainted meat, which is the only kind of meat readily available, I don’t really eat meat anymore, so no typical thanksgiving foods for me, although I did enjoy the non meet ones a lot, and I also really enjoyed seeing my not blood family who I haven't seen all together in ages. 

We didn't watch football, we watched comedy. And we laughed and laughed, while admittedly it is still being plugged in to electronics I think its better than watching other people exercise... that turned into the usual discussion of the revolution, and where the hell it is, and how we need to get there. I brought up this class, to much awe and excitement from the crowd, who are probably the reason I, my whole life, have thought teachers should be revolutionary gardeners and not tentacles of the government. 

HW 17

This unit could not be coming at a more ironic time in my life, seeing as I will be missing a lot of it to be in the hospital. I have been hospitalized 16 times in 10 years, so by now I’m used to it. That doesn't mean I don’t hate it however. That doesn't mean I can’t smell the death and taste the fear when I’m in a hospital. It just means I have grown accustomed to those things as a part of my life. I've probably been accustomed to them since the tender age of 6. I think all that time being in the hospital, trying to think about anything else but the present, or looking deep inside your self past your lifetime into your own soul, brings you to a level that most people today couldn't fathom.

I almost died a bunch of times. The first time I was three, I slipped off my floating device and quickly sank to the bottom of the pool. I remember sitting there, on the floor of the deep end, and the overwhelming blue that was surrounding me. I wasn't scared at all, I didn't even really understand what was going on. Soon my mom had leapt into the pool and dragged me out again. December 1, death 0.

But just because I had cheated death, doesn't mean I wasn't keenly aware of it. In-fact from then on, I could always feel death, just steps behind me, seeking me out. But I remained hidden.

Another time, I was probably 10, I woke up bleeding which I had also grown used to. But this morning was different. I opened my mouth and it was like a fire hose in reverse. What was gushing profusely was hot and red. My blood. I swaggered to the bathroom where my memory ended. Years later, when I had gathered enough courage to relive that moment in my head, I found my memory didn't really stop there. It just moved. When I remember that day it all goes up to that moment, and then I pass out from blood loss. My best friend is in the kitchen helping my frantic grandma dial 911. There I am bleeding out ever so quickly, my whole family is gathered around me. The paramedics come, they rush in and clear out the room. How come I can remember all of that so well if I was passed out on the floor? I’ll tell you: because I was watching it. I saw it all happen from above. My soul left my body and it hovered there, and it decided that it had way too many plans to start all over, so it went back.

I think it’s comparable to enlightenment, if it isn't actually enlightenment. And its too damn bad that everyone can’t reach this level. That’s what we need to fix the world.



You can believe me or not. You can think I’m conceited or not. But I know what I lived. I know I’m much more in touch with my soul than most people nowadays are. I know death is looking for me, and I know I will keep outsmarting it till I’m good and ready.

THATS AN AWEFUL LOT OF ICE CREAM!

 

watch this to learn more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T67DvoH2H3E&feature=related

PAPER OUTLINE

Thesis-  he way America is run on a greedy capitalist mindset ends in most of the public living behind an iron curtain and slowly dying while the rich, on the other side of that curtain weighting it down with their fat wallets, get richer.



When Americas capitalist mindset of getting the most for the least spilled over into agriculture, horrors ensued, horror craftily hidden from the public until they were so subdues by the abundance of foods and processed corn, most people didn't care when the nightmarish truth came out. most people still dont even know this truth.

Americas normal food ways don't look so normal upon further inspection, and most people would be shocked and horrified to learn where their food is really coming from. even "organic" foods. 

most Americans shop at the supermarkets.

93% of Americans dont know where their food comes from.

there are many laws to protect the secrecy of the food industry.



When you really look at where most of Americas food is coming from you'll probably be horrified at the hellish conditions. 


business men control out food and douce them in chemicals

The way we get our copious amounts of food for so cheep makes it lose some of the natural healthiness it would provide.

Animal cruelty

an example of an alternative

HW 11- Final Project 1

after reading the Omnivores Dilemma and watching Food Inc. fully informed of everything unsaid, i was horrified. when i began reading the book i was shocked but not at all surprised at corn industry and how nearly everything Americans eat is corn. and it's all because a bunch of greedy corporate fat cats wanted to make more money that they already had. of course growing up with a very open and liberal mind in America i already knew that is how things work here and i also already had a good idea of the iron curtain covering the food industry, but i really had no idea what was behind it. i guess i knew a lot more than most people to begin  with, i knew about CAFO's and hormones and antibiotics and the life of those animals, to an extent, but learning and seeing what i did in the book and movie repulsed me to the point of no return. when i was a kid at summer camp there was this cow, Daisy i named her (i know what a cliché cow name but give me a brake i was 10.) we had rescued her from a nearby farm, she was caked in feces from head to toe, and riddled with pneumonia. since cows have always been my favorite and back then i always wanted to be a Vet i would go see her every day. we couldn't clean her for a while or shed die of the cold before she even dried so we waited for her to get better. ell i waited, no one els really had hope for her but still every day id go and walk her around the grass for a bit, let her feast, and even animals need company. eventually she got better and she lived at the camp for the next 5 years i went there. Daisy is what made me stop eating meat back then, and now i cant help but wonder of maybe Daisy came from one of those CAFOs, tossed out because they had tainted her meat with sickness... but its the thought of hundreds of thousands of other Daisy's, and pigs and chicken and maybe other animals, who weren't lucky enough to get sick, that have made me once again stop eating meat.
i have no problem with eating meat, its part of nature and its quite delicious, but i do have a huge problem with the way we eat meat in america. the industrial food system that is just brutally and wrongly disgusting. Im becoming a vegetarian for me, not because i think it will help cause, but because i don't want to be a part of the gruesome food chain that is industrial agriculture, and while i know that is marginally impossible, i don't want to take part in eating the beings that suffer the most due to it.
my mother, who always tried to buy us organic food even with its costs and had tried to avoid feeding me and my sister junk food (aka corn) until it was really no longer possible, was with me on my feelings about the food industry. i asked her what she thought those cage free chickens actually did with their days. she said what most people would, and what the businesses want you to believe, all grass and sunshine. but no. i told her what they really do with their dark and crudely numbered days.

but just not eating meat and trying to avoid processed and genetically modified corn as much as possible simply isn't good enough. sure maybe your helping yourself, the the problem is still getting worse and worse. i think you teaching about this stuff, the whole normal is weird basis you your course, is one of the best steps I've seen toward change. if every teacher in america was teaching this, and every student in america really learned it, maybe it would be able to undo some of the brainwashing thats been so successfully corrupting my generation. if it was commonly taught in schools, what out government really does for us, maybe the youth wouldn't just brush you off ac crazy when you spoke of how much we needed change. maybe they would care more about getting things done and fixing out crumbling country, instead of worrying about video games and celebrities. Im hoping to be more than just radical ideas. Im hoping to make a difference, and inspire people to do the same. Im hoping to spur the rebirth of revolutionaries.