The true cost of everything

A friend of mine recently had to take her daughter to the emergency room for stitches. After the procedure, the doctor gathered up the metal utensils she'd used and threw them in the trash. My friend, a very environmentally conscious young lady, was horrified and questioned the doctor about it. "Yeah," she shrugged, "it's cheaper for us to throw them away than it is to sterilize them." How is this possible, my friend wondered? Surely there must be someone in the world that could use this metal. "Did it get recycled? I asked. She said it went right into the garbage, medical waste. "That shit gets buried," she said. Wow.

In this month's National Geographic is an article about "The real price of gold." This metal, that has nearly no uses other than ornamentation, has been soaring in price since 9/11. As the economy of the world becomes more uncertain, people up their hoarding of gold. The article says that all of the nuggets of gold in the world have been mined or are totally inaccessible. What's left is dust. One of the largest commercials mines in the world digs for particles of dust so small that 200 would fit on a pinhead. Technology has made it possible for man to separate these tiny particles from rock but at great cost to our environment.

On one island in Indonesia, a volcano, once 1,800 feet tall, is now a gold mine a mile deep. To mine one ounce of gold (the amount used for the average gold ring), 250 tons of rock have to be relocated. To accommodate that rock, hundreds of acres of virgin forests are razed. The chemical runoff is dumped into the ocean. The company that operates this mine pays the local government to offset the environmental damage but everyone knows that in 20 years, the gold will be gone and so will the funds flowing into their homes, churches, schools and hospitals. What will be left is total environmental devastation.

That doesn't even take into account the human devastation that these industries are causing already. 25% of the world's gold is mined by enterprising individuals who camp in mountains by the thousands without any sanitation. They pour buckets of mercury-tainted water into the rivers even as the deadly element cuts their own life short. I can't help but think that the reason it's cheaper to throw metal into a landfill in America is because the true cost is being absorbed by someone less fortunate. Only when the cost of this devastation reaches our shores will it be too expensive for us to waste.

Suicidal maniacs

Last week, a young man in Portland, Oregon took his own life. But before doing so, this unlikely murderer bought a semi-automatic weapon and went on a shooting spree that left two teens dead and seven wounded. One of the dead and five of the injured were foreign exchange students from Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Taiwan, Italy and France. The dead girl's parents will fly to the United States to pick up their daughter's body. Can you imagine the horror these families must feel at the insanity that is our country?

Other countries issue traveler's alerts if there's been recent war or terrorist activity but there is never an alert issued for traveling in the U.S. "Warning: you may be gunned down at any moment by a suicidal maniac." We live in a country that finds it totally acceptable to lock people up without rights if they are suspected to know anything about terrorist activity but vehemently defend the individual's right to buy a gun designed for killing lots of people in a short period of time and using it indiscriminately against U.S. and foreign citizens.

While the Republicans are hammering at Obama's every move, no one is even talking about this ever present assault on our mental, moral and physical well-being. Imagine the sorrow of the family of this young man who never expected him to become a killer and yet having found a note left to his roommate explaining how to sell his belongings for cash and "sorry," can only now remember their son as a murderer in the first degree. All during the presidential campaign, the Republicans painted Obama as a crazy hammer and sickle wielding liberal while they waved the constitution in one hand and a semi-automatic in the other.

It's no wonder the rest of the world thinks we're gun crazy. My cousin from England is finally coming out for a visit this summer after about ten years of coaxing. She was terrified, she said, of being gunned down and wanted to avoid the cities. We were planning to drive up the California coast into Oregon and to Portland to visit my brother. I remember saying to my mom that Portland wasn't really even a city, things like that didn't happen there. I guess I was wrong.