Addict Nation (30 page)

While poverty and disease should make people in developing countries think twice before procreating, America has its own brand of struggles with thoughtless and irresponsible procreation.

True story: In New York State a cocaine-addicted, unemployed, and homeless woman gives birth to a baby, who is placed in foster care. The woman proceeds to give birth to three more children. Each infant tests positive for cocaine. Each baby is quickly taken from the mother and put in foster care. The last baby is taken from the mother a week after its birth. The judge overseeing this woman’s case becomes fed up, noting, “It is painfully obvious that a parent who has already lost to foster care all four of her children born over a six-year period, with the last one having been taken from her even before she could leave the hospital, should not get pregnant again soon, if ever. This is a practical, social, economic and moral reality.” The judge added that the babies were “for all practical purposes motherless and fatherless.” Calling that unacceptable, the judge then ruled that this mother could not become pregnant again until she proved that she was capable of taking care of the kids she’d already brought into this world. Ditto for the dad! Unconstitutional? Probably!
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But I bet you can understand the judge’s frustration.

Welfare advocates have fashioned a system that—albeit unintentionally— encourages many young, uneducated, unemployed mothers to get pregnant in order to receive the additional government check that comes with each new, hungry mouth. They call it “IQC” or “Increase for a Qualified Child.” Some people call it “going on the county.” While welfare reform has achieved some improvements, we—as a culture—need to devise a more sophisticated system that protects children while ending financial incentives that spur young women to get pregnant for the worst of reasons.

Family planning must be part of the curriculum in public school. We need more innovative programs, like the great one I read about where girls are given a taste of the rigors of parenthood by having to take care of a “mock” baby for a month. The concept of “abstinence only” needs to be exposed for the false notion that it is. We need to get real and accept that intellectual concepts like abstinence are a very low defense against powerful biological urges, especially among hormonal teens. As Americans who pride ourselves on helping others, we need to get our own “house in order” so that we may carry the message to others.

The Politics of Procreation
Makes Very Strange Bedfellows

The Catholic Church, welfare proponents, and Hollywood are all complicit in overpopulation. Every baby born is a new customer for movie-inspired merchandise from SpongeBob SquarePants lunch boxes to Hannah Montana designer wear. Cable networks are also getting monstrously huge ratings following freakishly large families like the Gosselins, the Duggars, and—though she’s yet to score her own major show—Octomom. There are forty children between the three families.

Gay Is the New Green?

It’s ironic. For most of human history people needed to procreate persistently to survive as a species. But, today, we’ve reached a tipping point. Now, overpopulation is the biggest threat to our survival as a species (not to mention all the other species we’re taking down with us). What solution would you prefer to restore balance? A plague? Another world war?

Nature invariably comes up with solutions to problems that spring up in the environment. The “carrying capacity” of any species is the number of individuals a given environment can sustain. This is Mother Nature in her most efficient form. If the population of any species gets to be too much, nature has a bag of tricks to help control things. It is interesting that the world’s gay-rights movement is surging at the very moment in history when our global population is soaring. Is nature providing balance by offering an alternative for coupling that precludes procreation in its traditional form and even encourages adoption? It’s just something to think about.

More Does Not Equal Better

There is a pop-culture term for people who are obsessed with procreation. Some call them “breeders.” That term was taken from the business of animal breeding where animal exploiters breed dogs, cats, and horses for profit, ignoring the fact they are contributing to a massive pet overpopulation crisis. Many millions of these beautiful animals are killed every year because there are simply not enough homes for them. Our all-American, more-is-better mentality is a form of madness that often results in cruelty to both four- and two-legged creatures.

Reducing Every American’s Carbon Footprint

If Americans want to continue to have the freedom to create big families, then we have a moral obligation to compensate by tempering our voracious consumption of finite resources. We cannot keep indulging all of our cultural addictions simultaneously! Experts warn that, given the world’s surging population, food production is going to have to skyrocket or mass starvation will soon become as commonplace as floods or fires. We have a moral obligation to reform food production so it can feed the most people using the fewest resources.

Many Americans are surprised to learn they can take a huge leap in reducing their slice of the earth’s resource pie by simply going vegetarian or, better yet, vegan. According to the United Nations, “More than half of the world’s crops are used to feed animals, not people.” It takes over seven pounds of grain to create one pound of edible hog flesh. That same amount of grain could feed an entire family for a week in a Third World country. Each year, we could feed the entire United States and still have enough food left over to feed 1 billion people if we simply gave up meat and switched to a plant-based diet. Yet, when we talk about the earth’s dwindling resources and how the world’s exploding population is causing a starvation crisis, the simple, obvious solution of forgoing meat and dairy is rarely mentioned! Very few mainstream environmental organizations even have vegetarian platforms. Why not? Because many so-called environmentalists, including Al Gore, are still carnivores. While eager to tell everyone else how to live, they—themselves—refuse to alter their own most ingrained habits, like meat consumption. The idea of Al chatting up some fellow VIP about global warming over steak and eggs is, to my mind, the perfect portrait of hypocrisy. And then there’s water.

Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink!

The greatest threat to people trapped in a vortex of overpopulation is the absence of clean, drinkable water. Lawrence Smith, president of the Population Institute, notes, “If the water goes, the species goes. That sounds kind of alarmist considering there’s water all around us, but 97 percent plus is saltwater, and the freshwater that we use to sustain ourselves is just native to 3 percent. . . . So the accessibility of water, the competition for water, the availability of water is going to be a major, major threat.”
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Let it be noted that it takes hundreds of times more water to make meat than it does vegetables and grains. It takes about 60 gallons of water to produce a pound of potatoes versus at least 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. In fact, some experts say it may take more than twice that.
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While some quibble with the exact numbers because there are many variables, nobody disputes that meat production is phenomenally more water intensive than vegetables and grains, including soybeans, rice, wheat, and corn.

Put another way, the water that goes into a 1,000-pound cow could fill a harbor. So skip the burger if you want to feel better about putting a bun in the oven.

Smarter Choices

Whether it’s food or families, it’s become imperative that we all start making more evolved choices that take into consideration the impact on our environment and the other people/creatures with whom we share this finite, fragile earth. Imagine a world without overpopulation. It’s a world where every child has a home and food to eat. It’s a world with no lonely, traumatized orphans. It’s a world where all the people alive share our collective resources in a fair manner so that global warming has been abated. It’s a world where every human and animal gets the attention, sustenance, and nurturing they need. Some would call that a naïve fantasy. But to make any profound change, we must first let go of old thinking and set a new intention. Why don’t we close our eyes and, for a few seconds, try to imagine this kinder world.

Let’s make it easier for couples, both straight and gay, to adopt. Let’s have the courage to teach family planning in schools. Let’s get our own house in order: eat responsibly, procreate responsibly, show compassion, and reach out to help other nations struggling with overpopulation. Let’s give birth to a new consciousness.

Chapter Nine
THE GLUTTONS: Addicted to Food

I
headed for the refrigerator one evening when my ninety-four-year-old mother looked at me from across the kitchen. She sized me up and then quietly said, “Jane, you’re getting FAT.” Now, my mother doesn’t criticize me very often so this got my attention. Of course, I was irritated. Who wants to be told the truth about something like that! But it was the kind of thing only somebody who loves you would dare to say. Call it a one-sentence intervention. It did the trick. It was precisely what I needed to break through the logjam of my denial. It had been a while since my scale had died. I never replaced the battery. My fear of finding out how much I weighed was so ingrained in my psyche that I went to the store twice to buy a new battery for my scale and got the wrong size each time.

What would Freud say?

Yes, I—like most Americans—have food issues. I never did while I was drinking. So long as I had my chardonnay security blanket, I could nibble on a salad and be perfectly content. But when that was taken away from me a decade and a half ago, suddenly food entered my life as a serious contender for my attention and my extremely addictive tendencies. It was my new route to escape!

At the age of fifty-four, I found it ever more difficult to keep the weight off. The days when I could run fifteen miles and take off five pounds in one afternoon of binge exercise were long gone. Although I do sweaty yoga, which I find extraordinarily strenuous, I seemed to be compensating for it afterward with sweet treats I felt I had earned. Along with my food addiction, I discovered there are subsets, including sugar addiction. I am a sugar addict. I also have a tendency to be a “night eater.” It appears, despite all my years of recovery and therapy, I still have some real emotional issues. I was eating to stuff down feelings and conflicts that used to disappear in the fog of alcohol.

Why do I tell you all this? Because you’re not going to listen to anything I have to say if I don’t first prove to you that I understand what food cravings feel like and how powerful they are. In recovery lingo, it’s called “qualifying.” And, believe me, I qualify.

Millions of Americans can relate. We have been self-medicating ourselves with fat and sugar for so long it has become a standard of living. As a result, our country is suffering from a mind-blowing obesity crisis. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese.
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It would be safe to say that obesity is our nation’s biggest health issue, and reports show this epidemic impacts every facet of our lives from health care to global warming. We’re fat! Our kids are fat! And it’s making us miserable, sick, unattractive, and costing us a fortune. So . . . WTF are we going to do about this problem of ours?

“I’ve been in practice for thirteen years, and when I first started out I had mostly healthy-weight kids with a few obese kids that I would see. Now the opposite seems to be true. I have mostly overweight and obese patients and a few that are normal weight patients.”

—Dr. Leslie Brown, pediatrician

Look for a moment at this behavior from the perspective of addiction. It’s easy to admit the obvious. We are a nation obsessed with food. On April 25, 2010, in the
New York Times Book Review
,
most
of the books on the advice and how-to list were about food:
Women, Food and God
;
Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood
;
Jamie’s
Food Revolution
;
The Kind Diet
;
The Pioneer Woman Cooks
;
Hungry
Girl 1-2-3; Now Eat This!; Food Rules
;
The Belly Fat Cure
;
Cook This,
Not That!; The New Atkins For a New You;
and my personal favorite,
Skinny Bitch
.

TV has also jumped on the food gravy train with an entire network devoted to food, plus a slew of shows on various networks that form the new genre dubbed “Fat TV”: NBC’s
The Biggest Loser,
A&E’s
Kirstie Alley’s Big Life,
Oxygen’s
Dance Your Ass Off,
and Fox’s
More to Love.
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We’re talking and thinking and watching shows about food and fat and, as we do, eating more and getting fatter. Ain’t that the perfect portrait of addiction! By way of comparison, it reminds me of how I spoke incessantly about my alcohol problem for years with various therapists and friends. Even as I castigated myself, I kept drinking through the whole process. I rationalized that I was “working on it.” Being an alcoholic, my drinking progressively got worse, despite my willingness to bore my friends with an endless litany of excuses and explanations that really should’ve been billable hours.

Unfortunately, as I know now, the kind of talk in which I was engaged was rife with alcoholic thinking. I was essentially negotiating with my disease and using my therapist and my friends as mediators. I was “bargaining” with my cravings, trying to come up with some deal that would allow me to have it both ways: get rid of my drinking problem while still drinking. It was about as effective as the Mideast peace process. It was only when I finally hit bottom and admitted to myself and to another human being that I was totally powerless over alcohol—helpless against even a drop of it—that the huge shift occurred and I was able to walk away from the stuff. I had surrendered to the truth. Sobriety, no matter what substance we’re talking about—booze or food—demands, above all else, honesty and surrender!