This little piggy went to market....

I am remembering the common nursery rhyme that my grandfather used to sing with me as a toddler...he would gently pinch my toes, we'd laugh and I'd squeal as he recited this familiar children's verse, each line corresponding to a single toe:

"this little piggy went to market
this little piggy stayed home
this little piggy had roast beef
and this little piggy had none
and this little piggy cried
wee wee weeeeeee
all the way home."

now, I'm not going to break this thing down too much.

but given the current backdrop of the 'swine' flu, i just couldn't let it go.

that little piggy that had none of the roast beef was a smart piggy.

cuz the 'roast beef' "food" of today's factory pig farms goes completely against what the little piggies should be eating in the first place. a strange concoction of all manner of dangerous ingredients such as bovine offal, synthetic growth hormones and antibiotics.

all the piggies should run home squealing WHAT THE FUCK!!!???? instead of 'wee wee wee'.

ruminants eating corn and vegetarians eating these ruminants' ground-up parts. it's an ecological cycle that's sure to spawn some new scary-species jumping microbes, as well as wake up some that had been lying happily dormant.

we've just really peeked into the 21st century and already the 'emerging diseases' are rearing their viral heads. it's enough to make me start screaming 'wee wee weeeee!!!'---not of a delighted child, but of paranoia and pessimism.

now we have to update Porfirio Diaz famous statement: Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.

Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States' freakish agriculture projects exported thru neoliberal pressures and gone tragically awry.

this little piggy really did go to the market.

then there's the question of 'what's the real problem here?'

millions of people dying daily from malnutrition, drinking toxic water, breathing toxic air, living in toxic neighborhoods, and having their bodies riddled with parasites.

do we even need to do the math for points of comparison in terms of mobilization of the public health machinery?

health problems and diseases that we can either completely prevent, or mitigate through available and known technology and cheap medicines.

microbes live. microbes flourish. flu strains appear---ebb and flow---over the ages. dangerous epidemics occur. but the real kindling for stoking microbial fires is systemic inequality and poverty.

there are reasons why don't we see cholera outbreaks in the united states anymore, but we do see e-coli outbreaks.

'wee wee weeeeee' all the home!

meanwhile the constant, background hum of the real 'weapons of mass destruction' threatens to drown out the roar of discontent, anger, desperation and anguish of the world's most vulnerable people.

to paraphrase Michael Marmot, the British epidemiologist: There are no natural 'disasters'. There are only natural phenomena. All 'disasters' are the product of human action, greed, or neglect.