Reactionaries Who Love Nature

True reactionaries want to obliterate all signs of modernity. They want to return to the state of nature, to a time before the Industrial Revolution. They believe that living in harmony with nature will make them healthy and happy.

They hate anything that resembles a pollutant. They detest anything that looks inorganic. They are even appalled by antibiotics and vaccines, those horrid products of Big Pharma.

They are on the side of God’s nature. Antibiotics and vaccines are the Devil’s work.

What happens when such people impose their reactionary ways on innocent and unsuspecting children?

Amy Parker tells us all about it in Slate:

I am the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was 1, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy; we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil.

I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm in England’s Lake District, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunchbox once in a while and biscuits instead of fruit, like all the other kids.

We ate (organic local) meat maybe once or twice a week, and my mother and father cooked everything from scratch—I have yet to taste a Findus crispy pancake, and oven chips (“fries,” to Americans) were reserved for those nights when Mum and Dad had friends over and we got a “treat.”

The results:

As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox….

I developed penicillin-resistant quinsy at age 21—you know, that old-fashioned disease that supposedly killed Queen Elizabeth I and that was almost wiped out through use of antibiotics.*

At what point does this kind of parenting become child abuse? When do we wake up and see that these parents are sacrificing their children’s health on the altar of a dumb idea?