Just use soap, for crying out loud

In today’s Chronicle, Mark Morford addresses something that I’ve been a big believer in for decades: that our anti-bacterial, sterile, plastic society is leading to our demise.

It is fascinating. It is squiggly and squishy and weird and wonderful — you know, just like life. I hold it up to the light. I hold it close to my face, my nose, my mouth. I am examining. I am expanding my tiny little brain. My mouth is possibly wide open in wonder.

It is apparently at this precise moment that my father looks up, glances over to check on me, sees a giant earthworm dangling over my wide-open mouth. He is, naturally, a tiny bit startled. He shouts my name, hoping to halt the inevitable. I jump. I react accordingly.

And I do the only natural thing: I pop that fat sucker into my mouth and swallow it down whole, germs, dirt clods, slimy goodness and all, and give my dad an innocent “Who, me?” look. Mmmm, childhood.

I did not get the slightest bit sick. I did not even get queasy. I do not, in fact, recall feeling that I had actually done anything comestibly incorrect, nor did the act cause me any permanent aversion toward playing in the soil or digging for big fat happy earthworms. (Though of course, munching that bad boy, despite being a clear example of superior intelligence, is an act my two older sisters have, to this day, refused to let me live down. Sisters. What can you do?)

Of course, it turns out, biologically speaking, that big, dirty earth-muncher probably did my immune system, my intestinal tract and all the happy bacteria therein a world of good. It’s true.

It’s a notion backed up by my favorite article of late, from Kent Sepkowitz over at Slate, who happily argues, in the face of recent E. coli outbreaks and nasty meat recalls and the ominous dangers of virulent organisms out to eat your brain, that, far from not cleaning, cooking and irradiating our food well enough and far from not ensuring we have the correct FDA precautions, we as an overpampered culture are probably not getting enough nasty buggy immune-system-boosting microbes in our diet, in our meats, in our mouths. And therefore we should probably, you know, eat a bit more crap. As in, excrement.

He’s referring, of course, to the trace amounts of nasty fecal-related bugs and bacteria that come along with our topsoil and meats and foodstuffs, and that, while minimizing their presence is an excellent plan, eradicating them completely from human consumption is doing our bodies more harm than good and might eventually make us all into a bunch of biological “bubble-baby” wimps who can’t even touch a plant without falling over and convulsing. Hell, it’s already happening.

All of which dovetails nicely with another new study, this one from Britain, that says guess what, boys and girls are actually not made of snips, or snails, or puppy dog tails, sugar or spice or anything nice. Nor are we made of the usual suspects, of blood and bone and skin and vodka and wine and residual plastic polymer molecules that come from licking your iPhone way, way too much.

No, unless you’re Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or Pete Doherty and are therefore made up of equal parts Xanax and Diet Coke and nitrous oxide, we are all essentially made of — you guessed it — great heaping gobs of bacteria, massive hordes of them, all manner of wacky bugs and parasites and wondrous horrible-looking microorganisms all munching happily on the same air and blood and burrito that you do, trillions of toothy things working in some sort of bizarre harmony to keep you alive, despite how some might like to kill you. What’s more, this is a good thing.

Ah, there’s the rub. Because while this knowledge, these bacteria, is/are vital and essential to our survival, the cultural mind-set at large runs directly opposite. So much so that we could be, in effect, cleaning and scrubbing and protecting ourselves to death, as our immune systems whimper and wither and drug-resistant bacteria get nastier and nature always, always finds a way to thwart our silly efforts to eradicate its wild side.

Hell, just look at the ads, the obnoxious articles, the insidious marketing, the cleaning solvent aisle at the supermarket, all screaming the same shrill one-note alarm (and all, by the way, apparently aimed straight at the same sad demographic: frumpy paranoid moms with too many kids and too little time to actually, you know, read): Bacteria is bad! Germs are evil! Don’t touch that doorknob! If you consider yourself a good parent, if you love your kids, you must scrub every surface and sanitize every toilet and wash your hands 12 times an hour and oh my God don’t ever ever ever let your kids eat something from the floor or the table or the backyard garden because what are you, insane?

Yes, obviously, it’s just more fear-based B.S. for a fear-based culture, right? Easy enough.

Problem is, the pattern doesn’t stop there. That alarmist germophobic mind-set that insists on sanitized overcooked ultra-safe bleached-out everything then grows and mutates and extends well beyond the toilet and the kitchen and the backyard and the human gut, straight into human experience as a whole, resulting in one horrifically bland, edge-free, prefab life.

Tract homes. Cruise ships. Gated communities. Giant, vacuum-sealed malls. Swimming pools with no deep ends. Swimming pools built 50 yards from the warm, dangerous ocean in Hawaii. Theme restaurants. Theme hotels. Theme vacations. Theme nature. Second Life. Megachurches. Groupthink. Intellectual numbness. Spiritual stasis. Rubber gloves. Face masks. Body condoms. Processed foods. Bans on raw milk. Quadruple-washed lettuce. Spitting instead of swallowing. Entire islands and towns built and owned and operated by the Walt Disney Company.

And then, wider: Fear of your own body. Fear of sex, blood, bodily fluids, human contact. Fear of pain, aging, death. Fear of nature. Fear of the new. Fear of the different, the strange, the foreign, the Other. Voila: you’re a meek little island and everything looks like an invading force.

The trend is palpable, obvious, sad. We seem to be all too happy to have as much raw human experience filed down to a safe nub as possible, all contingencies taken care of and all bacteria scrubbed away and all dangers bleached out and not a single thing left to chance because oh my God what if something went wrong? What if it all broke down? What if you caught something and got sick and died?

But then again, so what? Maybe we need to be reminded, over and over again, that taking that risk and eating that crap and rolling in the dirt and opening to that wicked sense of uncertainty is actually what makes all the difference. You think? Is it not better to swallow that fat squishy worm of dirty, squirmy life, and find out?

When I was young — well, younger, there were no warnings about peanut allergies. Kids weren’t rolled around in anti-microbial shopping carts. People didn’t carry around personal bottles of anti-bacterial hand lotion. What happened? Where did the sterility trend begin, and how did it become a multi-billion dollar industry?
I’m dead-set against this trend. I think kids should play in the dirt. They should have a dog and let the dog lick their face. We should all roll around in the grass and eat french fries off the floor. Yes, these new and serious allergies are now with us, and once you’ve got one you can’t just ignore it. But I sincerely believe that if you start out living a non-sterile life, the chances of becoming so sensitive to the environment around you are pretty much nil. My brother and I may be the last generation to not have these problems, growing up as we did in the 1970s and 80s before the anti-bacterial revolution. I wasn’t one for getting too dirty and never liked grass, but my brother had no problems with it and more than once we rounded the corner of the house to find some insect legs dangling out of his mouth. Neither of us have any allergies or sensitivities. The same can’t be said of my other brother and sister, who were born in the 1980s and grew up in the 90s.
I wonder if anyone has done research on the rise in such sensitivities over the years and correlated that information with the rise in anti-bacterial products?

p.s. I know it isn’t good form to reproduce an entire column, and I did lop off, I think, one paragraph; but Mark Morford writes in such a flowing way that it is impossible to edit out anything and still keep track of what he’s saying.

Meanwhile, take a look at this article from the New York Times about this bacterial obsession:

Antibacteria mania and germ-phobia — twin phenomena in a society increasingly obsessed by cleanliness — have been in full view amid all the public hoopla over MRSA, the drug-resistant staph infection that has caused a public health scare lately.

To prevent the spread of MRSA, public health authorities are urging people to wash their hands frequently with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand sanitizer; to cover all wounds with clean bandages; and to avoid sharing towels and razors. Those who share sporting equipment should clean it first with antiseptic solution.

But a state assemblyman from Brooklyn would like to take things a step further. The assemblyman, Dov Hikind, announced today that a hand-sanitizer manufacturer would distribute 10,000 hand-sanitizing “pens” for use by city schoolchildren.

“These GelRite pens are self-contained dispensers with alcohol-based hand sanitizer,” said Mr. Hikind, a Democrat. “They’re compact and easy to use and will encourage students to clean their hands frequently. A few ounces of pen prevention are worth pounds of cure.”