What You Wish For

I remember as a kid picking strawberries in the ditch near our farm. Nothing I loved better than the taste of wild strawberries...great on their own, incredible with a little sugar and cream. I had this fantasy that one day I would come across a patch of wild strawberries with berries so big that one would fill my cup unlike the hours it took to get together enough of the tiny things for a batch of jam.

Then there was my fantasy about being able to make all the weeds on the long rows of vegetables in my mother's garden disappear without having to pull them. Sounds like I was a lazy kid doesn't it? Well maybe I was, but on a summer day when there were forests to explore, kittens to play with and dugouts to swim in, weeding the garden felt like purgatory.

And so it isn't hard for me to imagine the creative mind that wants to perfect the strawberry and demolish the weeds. Cross breeding, hydroponic, fertilizing magic and you can grow a strawberry the size of my fist. A drop from a bottle of RoundUp and the dandelion is gone...it seems crazy not to do it.

Why is it that if something is really really good that we assume more of it would be better? How is it that eliminating or simplifying work only seems to create more? As a species are we predisposed to this need for more stuff with less work or is it a function of our conditioning? Where is this leading us?

Davra Davis writes in "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" that information about what causes cancer has been suppressed so we can make money on curing it. One of largest groups of people affected by cancers such as leukemia are farmers. Farmers who in the last 40-50 years have been sold massive amounts of chemicals to fertilize crops and annihilate pests. My Dad is fighting leukemia at this very moment. This is not what imagined as I made my wishes.

What influence do I have on what my children wish for?