Free Radicals

Like a maple tree, our bodies grow from a seed; gathering stellar dust and organic nutrients found in the planetary environment into a trunk and limbs, in order to fashion a being that is alive as an individual and also part of the web of life. In the case of a human being, we know that our bodies can feel, ponder and even walk out of the garden in which we have come into our individuality.

Some of us pause, wonder, and feel indebted to the whole in which we experience ourselves as an integral part. Others, if they ever did pause and wonder, find themselves dedicated to filling up their baskets with things that are not nailed down so firmly that it isn’t worth their trouble to pry them loose. These fellow humans become like what are called “free radicals” in the human body which, when they become too radical and too detached from the overall functioning of a healthy body, cause diseases such as ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) to ravage the host.

We live in a society in which this kind of freedom (the freedom to roam ‘free’ among the commons and scoop up everything not nailed down, as if they were tokens in a game of Monopoly) has drastically curtailed the freedom of human beings and maple trees to grow from seeds to a healthy maturity, in unison with the web of life in which they live.

I had a good friend, Foster Hall, who lived and died with ALS and I think of him when I think of our society suffering, as his body suffered, from the presence of Free Radicals.

“Free radicals are missing an electron from their outer shell. That makes them unstable, so they go and steal an electron from the molecules in your skin cells, or from your blood cells or from wherever they can. That causes damage to surrounding cells,”

That seems a fair description of the lack of balance that allows a few billionaires to steal so much that Musk ‘owns” more than half of all Americans together.

Now that the Earth’s bounty is being stashed away in private baskets to such a radical extent that Earth herself is crying out in distress (now that free radicals are stealing electrons from so many neighboring molecules), we wonder if anything can be done.

Unfortunately, ALS remains an uncurable, terminal disease of the human body. And it appears that the prevailing economy, which allows Trump and his minions to roam through the commons taking billions along the way, suffers from a terminal momentum that is corrupting everything it touches. Perhaps we have to acknowledge that both ALS and the extraction economy are fatal conditions, which we lack the ability to remedy.

Yet Foster lived his life on terms he created through his boundless appetite for life, even though his time on Earth was shortened and physically curtailed by the ravages of ALS. Perhaps I’ll ponder this and if his example provides any insight applicable for the rest of us, I’ll share it next time.