primalmommy on sun 5 nov 06
So, mel, let me see if I have this right:
People who don't maintain their equipment -- grease, clean, change
filters, change elements, service and maintain their
cars/chainsaws/kilns/rifles/pug mills, are irresponsible. Idiots, even.
Never mind if folks don't know a valve cover from a spark plug, if they
own the equipment, they ought to RTFM and figure it out.
But people who are worried about keeping their lungs in good working
condition -- or the effect of toxic chemicals in their blood, the state
of their livers, chromosomes and brain cells -- they're all about fear.
We don't know as much about brain function, birth defects, cancer as we
do about chainsaws. Even the best doctors don't have the whole manual.
How can careful be bad? I can get another pug mill, but bodies are one
per customer.
Sure, there are healthy old potters who have done all the "wrong" stuff
for years and are doing just fine. Just like there are healthy old
fishermen who have eaten heavy-metal, PCB-tainted strains of Great Lakes
Fish all their lives. It's their kids who have the problems -- or the
grandkids. (The surgeon general now says nobody of childbearing age
should eat Great Lakes Fish. You don't see that on Chamber of Commerce
brochures, though.) There's a "goiter belt" through Great Lakes fishing
country -- thyroid problems, cancers, the kind of thing that can take
decades to show up. (Asbestos exposure can take 30 years to cause
problems. Mad cow too, 30 years.) People of Chernobyl will pay their
bill for generations, in cancers and birth defects.
We can't point to healthy old potters as proof of anything, just like we
can't point to our young potters battling cancers, or to those we have
lost, as proof of anything. It's not necessarily a cause-and-effect
situation, and anecdotal evidence is just not good science.
People say, "I use lead and I'm not dead yet". What if alive or dead
aren't the only choices? Children exposed to too much lead don't usually
die, it just costs them IQ points. Is that OK? Mutagens don't show up
for a generation or more. Nobody drops dead from them. So they are OK?
Without giving it too much thought, I could name half a dozen of of the
previous generation of potters -- some call them the "macho generation"
-- who sang the I-do-it-and-I'm-not-dead-yet-so-it-must-be-safe song all
their lives -- only now they have manganese induced Parkinsons, or
silicosis, or the oxygen tank to haul everywhere.
There's a lot of backslapping bravado about good old Voulkous, with his
cigars and cocktails right to the end. I'm not impressed. I saw photos
of the handsome young man, and I saw him at BGSU the year before he
died, smoking despite his throat cancer, stumbling drunk with his eyes
yellow with jaundice. I thought it was tragic. I though the should have
taken better care of the equipment.
I know there are people out there afraid of clay, of dirt, of their
shadows. I wince when I read posts on clayart that overreact (by my
measure) because I'm afraid people will miss the real dangers, stirred
in with the hysteria over trivial stuff. "Reefer madness" meets
ceramics.
Me, I was born in the 60s, came of age in the 70s. Maybe my perspective
just reflects my experience. My parents didn't have information they
needed, and regretted it later. Dad melted lead drapery weights every
winter in a closed closet under the stairs, sprayed migrant camps with
DDT as a summer job, worked with asbestos, taught chemistry and showed
us how to coat pennies with mercury for fun. Mom was an X-ray tech for a
doc who was missing fingers from holding babies under the machine. Her
favorite was when they x-rayed the bellies of pregnant women to see if
there were twins. When she was pregnant with me, she was given
"perfectly safe" DES. Her dad (my grandpa) worked at Dow Chemical for 40
years, making pesticides now internationally banned.
I hit my teens, in the 70s. This was before the age of "just say no" --
(my 50s parents never even heard of the stuff we were supposed to say
"no" to). You can't believe how many peers at college parties said, "Try
this! It's totally harmless! All those warnings are just nonsense
peddled by scaredy-cats. Don't be such a weenie, take some chances! Live
a little!"
Like most people, I chose who to listen to, based on what seemed more
convenient. (In other words, picked the one that let me do what I
wanted. Folks do it all the time. You read that your favorite habit is
unhealthy? Yeah, yeah, scaremongering. But if a headline says bacon is
health food -- it's proof! Bring on the bacon!)
Not all my peers lived to see their 40s -- some of those harmless things
were not some harmless, and in some cases (like HIV) some people didn't
have the information they needed, yet.
Now I am married to an environmental biologist and have waaaay too much
information. I understand bioaccumulation, and what happens to those
toxins that never leave our bodies, stored in fatty tissue (like
breasts). I know the risks, I can choose to take them at a level that
feels right to me. I'm OK with that. I make more careful choices for my
kids, erring maybe, but on the side of caution. If it turns out I really
didn't need to buy them organic milk - so what? I don't live in fear of
regular milk. I just educate myself, make choices and move on.
Here's the point: The problem with advice is that it sometimes
overestimates the listener's level of expertise. I think Twain said,
"the problem with trying to make things foolproof is that the fools are
so darn ingenious".
Example about advice: A book by Katie Granju called "Attachment
Parenting" begins with my poem, "Sleeping with Baby, December". (Right
across from a foreword from Dr. Sears.) It's a pretty good argument for
parenting the way everyone did before "civilization" ( half the world
still does) -- when nursing mothers slept with baby beside them, in the
family bed. No midnight wailing and pacing, no
screaming-herself-to-sleep in the crib, lower SIDS rates, better growth
rates.
All our babies slept with us, and I had strong feelings about this
particular aspect of "tribal parenting" (it's where "primalmommy"
originated.) Free those babies from crib-jail, respect your instincts,
all that. Of course, you won't squash the baby -- we are aware of our
surroundings, even in our sleep. Ever fall out of bed? Of course, a
bassinette is good for brand new babies, maybe a sidecar bed for bigger
kids if you are a restless sleeper...
Only it didn't occur to me that not everybody has instincts, and nothing
is ever a matter "of course". That somebody, somewhere, will put a
newborn face down on a waterbed, or in a pile of pillows, have a couple
of drinks or take a sleeping pill before bed, and baby suffocates. My
poem now has disclaimers.
Another example: I used to spend hours on the phone advising folks who
wanted to homeschool. In the seven years I have been doing this, (what
forms to fill out, how to get to support meetings, what the resources
are, curricula and assessments) -- I have met maybe a hundred families,
and watched them go on to do a marvelous job with their kids.
Then I met one family that should never have taken their kids out of
school. Unhealthy home environment, parents with major issues, basically
a very bright kid who spent a year at home watching Jerry Springer
because nobody would sober up long enough to take him to the library or
homeschool activities.
I felt responsible. I had helped them get started. Y'know what? I no
longer give homeschool advice, not if I can palm the phone calls off
onto somebody else.
So if you say, "manganese in glazes won't hurt anyone", consider the
pregnant potter, with the unvented kiln in the closed basement studio.
Vented kilns are not "of course" to everyone.
You hate the notion of "one size fits all" -- and rightly so. Advice is
like that too. It might not fit the child potter, the less informed
potter, the asthmatic potter, the student potter, or any young woman,
who carries every egg she'll ever have from the day she is born. (unlike
men, who keep making fresh tadpoles). Potters eat and drink in the
studio, wash glaze brushes in the kitchen sink with the pans, work with
lowfire stuff that you don't use and maybe don't have the specifics on.
Mystery glaze in a jar, left over from the 60s.
Not all potters have the information you have, and nothing is "of
course".
Like the lady who used your teapot on the burner all those years. I bet
you thought that disclaimer would be unneccessary. (Hey, it worked
really well for her, for along time). But now you advise against selling
lasagna pans, because some buyer will take it out of a hot oven and put
it on a marble countertop, and the potter will be sued.
Meanwhile people sell pitchers with barium glazed interiors, assuming
people will know it's just decorative and not for storing the baby's
orange juice in the fridge. Low fired, copper-penny raku pots are sold
without disclaimers all the time, by potters who should know better. "Of
course they will know not to use it for tomato soup"... it hurts us all,
as potters, when people learn the hard way, or toxicity makes the news.
Of course it's almost impossible to make that link. It takes a lot
longer than the hot lasagna down the legs.
I'm not trying to arm wrestle with you, mel, and I think you're a very
smart man. I just want to suggest that a) you may be overestimating how
obvious some things are to less experienced potters, and b) not everyone
who is cautious is acting from ill-informed fear. Some of us just plan
to keep doing this until we're 107and don't want to find out years from
now that we should have been more careful.
Yours,
Kelly in Ohio... who has a lot of nerve, actually, talking about "taking
care of the equipment today". I need a big bowl of aspirin right about
now. I went to bed last night with a very sore right shoulder, so of
course I got up this morning and decided to spend a few hours splitting
wood. With an axe, the old fashioned way. Jeff was working on his lathe
in the garage and came out to see what I was doing. "Are those your
steel-toed rubber crocs?" he says. Hmmmph. Fearmonger. ;0)
Get help today
Find a drug rehab treatment center that meets your needs. Call 24/7.
_______________________________________________________________
Get the Free email that has everyone talking at http://www.mail2world.com
Unlimited Email Storage – POP3 – Calendar – SMS – Translator – Much More!
Lee Love on mon 6 nov 06
Something that is very hard on the environment (from reading Jared
Diamond's Collapse), is Gold. The amount of waste you have to dig
up compared to the amount of gold you end up with is really high.
--
Lee in Mashiko, Japan
http://potters.blogspot.com/
"Let the beauty we love be what we do." - Rumi
"When we all do better. We ALL do better." -Paul Wellstone
Shakeel Abedi on tue 7 nov 06
That was one good post.
Points to ponder.
Shakeel
| |
|
