Fight chemical restlessness
Help. My kid is a soft drink and chips addict
— An anguished mother
Centuries hence, historians will recognise this age for what it truly is. The post-millennium era won’t be notched as the age of space exploration or growth of Internet. Our times will be laughingly known as the Age of the Chemically Induced Junkie, and if our unborn grandchildren have any horse sense, they will have bypassed us twitching shaking bimbos and moved on safely into sanity.
Chemical restlessness is the emotion of this crazy age we live in. It has an ‘oh so boring’ curve. It excites you, makes you shake like a monkey and suddenly flops you into a depressed wrung out state. Darting eyes, drumming fingers, curled toes, a mind that can’t focus on any one thought for more than half a second. A certain blankness of expression. Aimless wandering. No serenity in a smile or a glance. Constant regurgitation of some worn out phrase or other. Sudden flashes of uncontrolled temper. Few realise that this restlessness isn’t a natural expression of the human spirit as it confronts new opportunities and stresses. Nay. The restlessness is chemically induced, from childhood. By hundreds of neuro stimulators and depressants we swallow in our food and drinks. We are drugging ourselves into knee-jerk zombies.
This wasn’t the case till a century and a half ago until we invented white crystalline sugar. Once refined sucrose or white sugar was available, humanity got addicted to it. Why? It’s a long answer mom. Put it down as a manufacturing defect in our brains. You want to see sugar highs and the sugar lows? You give a big glass of sweetened soft drink to a kid and watch him jump, then get into a sniveling post high depression. Of course compared to what goes into our packaged foods these days, sugar is a sweet white angel. Nearly every junk food comes loaded with designer chemicals-molecules that hitch on to our nervous systems and cause cravings and addictions. So once you start eating that chip or cookie you mindlessly go crunch crunch till the pack is empty.
What’s lost is serenity. We become Molecule Man—a new type of nerd who needs his fix before he morphs into a superhero for the next half hour. What’s lost is stillness. The ability to be the eye of the storm and watch the world with detached grace and controlled power. What’s needed is common sense and courageous people who can dig out the truth and hammer it into our heads until we start kicking out these habits and the people who create them.
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