Toxicity

I visited with Rey at work today, and a woman came in attempting to sell perfumes, to which Rey kindly and honestly replied that both the owner of the store and her daughter are extremely allergic to such things as perfumes and harsh chemical smells. There’s a large air purifier in the back, which has evidently caught the attention of a customer earlier that morning because she suffered similar sensitivities, and the exclusion of perfumes from the store was something of a selling point. I was with Rey in no small part because we just received news that the father of a good friend died, around six this morning. He had been in and out of the hospital battling leukemia for several months, and more recently, recurring pneumonia. The news seems to bother her particularly because the father of other friends she grew up with passed away from cancer roughly a year ago, and then her grandfather died this summer past. I do not know the medical history of our friends recently departed father, but the other gentleman was something of an outdoorsman, hiking and kayaking and other such things in his free time. He worked as a teacher with the disabled, did not smoke or drink. These things strike without warning, without fairness, and often without apparent reason. Rey also has a cousin who was diagnosed some years ago with autism in a severe degree, an affliction which is not simply newly discovered, but perhaps genuinely a new ailment that decades ago was unheard of in any form.
What draws all these threads of thought together is the fear that we are living in an ever-rising level of toxicity. There was a time when one could feel justified in pointing fingers, linking serious illness to obvious causes, whether the fault of the individual or not. Those days seem to have gone, the chemicals in our environment now so utterly pervasive that even if one can point down the most likely of a half-dozen toxic influences, who’s to say what’s really the cause. New disorders are popping up all the time, and while some may be simply giving names to long-existent things or even simply the creation of rampantly over-diagnosis, others are genuinely new creations of the cocktail of chemicals we come into contact with unavoidably on a daily basis. We are surrounded by chemical agents in every aspect of our lives to such a degree that they have largely become invisible. More and more we are hearing of people whose bodies have become highly sensitized in reaction, rendering them slowly more and more restricted not only within their homes, but in what they buy and bring into that limited environment. A more minor degree of such a reaction is present in even more people, who suffer migraines or nausea upon exposure to perfumes, cleaning solvents, and other chemical fumes. It’s as if a kind of reverse evolution has suddenly occurred; rather than adapting to the toxicity of our world, we have hit a point where our very bodies rebel against us in a plea to return our environment to an earlier state.
I am not an environmental activist, as I possess neither the passion nor nobility to make a grand fight for any cause. I am a likely target. Some years ago, I left my job and moved away from New York. I was very ill, not only from the rigours of stress and my own fall into alcoholism, but from simply being in that environment. My lungs are not the best, even now that it’s been well over a decade since I held a cigarette, and indeed they were at their worst at a time some years after I had quit smoking. The very air I lived in was, some days, simply too much. As someone who has both smoked and drank to excess in the past, and indeed suffered some price for both already, I am a likely candidate for cancer, or any number of other new and growing diseases. These things aren’t fair, however, and instead it will continue to strike at random, both at others who are far more blameless than myself and those who continue to willingly steep themselves in danger.
Hm. This has come out rather more morbid than I meant it to.