There is a very old folk tale about Chicken Little, who is hit on the head by an acorn and concludes that the sky is falling. He goes on to spread that belief into a sort of hysteria. It fits in with stories of a coming apocalypse, the end of days, the end of time, stories that are thousands of years old.
Today we live in the age of science where science supposedly will tell us what’s real and what’s not so we don’t have to run around like Chicken Little. A time when learned men and women of science, with the benefit of modern technology, can tell us what is really risky, and what’s not. Well, for whatever the reason, science doesn’t appear to be working all that well. Despite all of modern technology we can’t seem to figure it out.
For example, in the old days, people worried about getting enough to eat. Now, we have plenty to eat and everyone is apprehensive about what they’re putting in their mouths. You have to worry about food allergies, peanut allergies, egg-free, gluten-free, food that’s not organic, food that’s not genetically modified (GMO), antibiotics in meat, too much beef, farmed fish, wild fish, etc, etc. In the old days, if you wanted meat you just had to make sure the saber-toothed tiger didn’t get to you before you got to your meat.
That’s not all. Now we want to know how the cow was raised, did it have a happy home life, was it killed in a humane fashion, or should we even be eating formerly living creatures at all? Today, all the things I’ve mentioned have a lobby — people who are unalterably convinced that if you eat the wrong thing, in the wrong way, at the wrong time, you will practically be struck by a thunderbolt.
We currently know more about the world than we ever knew, the level of our science is extraordinary, our medications are entering an entirely new age, combining pharmacology and our knowledge of the human genomes. In turn, we are rapidly developing personalized medications and yet we all seem to be more apprehensive, more uncertain, more confused and more frightened then ever.
It plays itself out in thousands of different ways in our everyday lives and our everyday decisions. When you go to the supermarket, the standard advice is stay out of center aisles because it’s all manufactured food, which probably is in the main true. But this is Malibu, and we can generally afford fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. But how much of the other stuff we buy is just the result of marketing? There are lots of companies that conduct very sophisticated research to find out what trigger words we’ll respond to, what color seems richer and justifies the extra expense, or how they can get us to pay more for the same product because they lead us to believe that it’s safer, healthier, more nutritious, whether it actually is or isn’t. We all get manipulated all the time.
So, to bring it home, the question is who do you trust, who do you believe, when should you worry? We currently have that question here in Malibu in connection with the controversy over PCBs at Malibu High School. As a former litigator with over 20 years in the courtroom, I know that I had my experts, the defense had their experts, and often times you wondered if they were talking about the same case. Each side was trying to sell a different scenario to a jury. You might well think, “Well, that’s the courtroom, it’s not real life.” Unfortunately, real life isn’t any different than the courtroom. The conflicting claims are just that, conflicting. I don’t have an easy answer to the problems of conflicts. You have to look at the information, you have to look at its source, where it comes from and who has a vested interest in one answer or another. If need be, you have to hire your own expert, but you have to be very careful about that because there are a lot of experts out there with an agenda. My own judgment is you want an expert who has an impeccable reputation for objectivity, someone who doesn’t make a career of being on one side or the other, and who has no vested interest in one or other outcome.
It appears to me that the question we are dealing with are the presence of contained PCBs. Does that constitute a health risk? I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, but it is clear to me there is definitely a feeling of hysteria involved in all of this, and the quicker the issue is resolved the better for everyone.