The Purel Problem

While at the store today following my wife around, like I frequently do as I have very little to do in stores that don't sell books or electronics, I found myself in the cleansers aisle. She was on a quest for the exact correct kind of dish soap and had dotted out of my sight while I was distracted by a fabric softener that claimed to have the scent of "vanilla and wild orchids". In reality it smelled like what I suspect a 9 year old girl's newly clean room would smell like, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

After the rather disappointing foray into fabric softener scents my gaze drifted and landed on five shelves, which were well more than a dozen feet long, containing "anti-bacterial" items. There were creams, gels, soaps, hand soaps, dish soaps, floor soaps, counter sprays, bathroom sprays; I could go on for several paragraphs, but I'll save us both. The point is, if there was something there that was meant to clean you, your kids, your house, your dog or anything else, there was an anti-bacterial version of it here.

I'm sure that you've read all of the recent news coverage of the "super-bugs" that are coming into being because of our over use of anti-biotic drugs (which, for those of you not near the Google button on your browser, are the medical equivalent of anti-bacterial soap). These drug resistant strains of bacteria (not to be confused with viruses, or virii, I just like to say that and don't get much of a chance to, which would be the flu, etc.) are getting so used to their daily barrage of penicillin that they are developing the bacterial version of Kevlar and just move on by, no matter how much crap we throw at it. That's scary stuff, as sooner or later, which varies depending on which doc you're talking to, some bug will come along that will be able to whip all of our asses and make bird flu look like a runny nose.

But, as usual, I digress...

Back to the store. So I'm roaming around this newly found section (which of course was always there but I just didn't notice because I spend far too much time in my addled mind thinking about whether or not the speed of light is constant and where my keys are) and I see that not only are there a lot of these anti-bacterial products, but I was hard pressed to find one that wasn't.

As a Buddhist I am against killing of anything, bacteria included...but, I also live in the real world and realize that there are some things that I can not only do nothing about, but should do nothing about. I know that people need salmonella free kitchens and staph free bathrooms. However, don't you think that we're talking this a little too far?

When I was a kid, there was another kid who was allergic to something, I don't remember what, just that we were always stuffing whatever it was into his hapless face and he'd run to some authority figure and I'd spend yet another day in the principals office (and I'm not kidding, I couldn't tell you the name of one of my middle school teachers, but I sure do remember the same of the principal and his secretary). But, and here's my point, he was the only kid.

Now, it seems like very kid is allergic to something and a lot of adults are too. Peanuts come to mind first of course. I'm sure that there were people allergic to peanuts before the 1990s, but I sure as hell didn't hear about it. Today, there are so many of them that some airlines are not serving them and passengers who are allergic can, and I'm totally not kidding here, request that no peanuts be served within a 5-row radius of their seat. (But stewardess, I requested the peanut section!)

Why all of a sudden has this happened, I hear you ask. Well, of course, I have an opinion, or at least a hypothesis. Anti-bacterial products.

I feel like we're getting to the point where we sanitize and clean ourselves and our houses to within an inch of their, or our, lives. This can't be good. Aren't we killing all of the little bugs that aren't really that harmful, and that we really need to have an immunity built up for? How long before we have cleaned the collective country to the point where none of us or our children will have any immunity to anything? We'll be like the Native Americans dropping dead from the pox brought from the Europeans.

We will get to the point where in order for our enemies to wipe us out they will not need atomic weapons or dirty bombs. They'll just need a sniffly third grader to come over and sneeze on a few doorknobs, and that'll be it.

So, I think I'll just have my slice of pizza sans the Purel, thank you. I'll take my chances.