The Left Progressive social conditioning of the Western nations is reaching achievements that would astound the generations of two hundred, one hundred, even fifty years ago. But these achievements are bearing fruit that rots on the vine, the abandonment of reason and morality that is stunting the physical, intellectual and moral growth of the next generation.

The “tolerance” crusade of the so-called ‘Progressives’ is a multi-pronged attack on individual responsibility, self-discipline and the individual’s duty to society, marriage and children. In the name of ‘tolerance” people turn their backs on murder of unborn infants, needing to be “open-minded” - a state of being more fearful of being taunted than fearing violent death of an innocent and defenseless human being. In the name of “tolerance” Americans back off debate, conditioned to react with fear and timidity when confronted with the vaguely defined, but daily utilized “controversial” – not champions of truth but cowed subjects to an artificial ‘peace and quiet.”

But Americans will pay a steep price for this passivity, this cowardice, this incuriosity. The next generation has been raised by television, by video games, by malls as their parents occupied their attentions elsewhere. Their morals, their guides have been gleaned and aped off of the 24/7 media, from fiction television shows, to false reality voyeurism, sophisticated cinema vapidity – years of steeping in a broth of Progressive conditioning to capitulate to a monolithic state of conformity that claims to be diverse as it steadily narrows the scope of “approved” behaviors, dress, beliefs.

One of the most egregious of the manifestations of ignorance in this “Information Age,” enabled by the cowed passivity of this phony “tolerance” is the unquestioned spread of a dietary-driven lifestyle that is constructed to deliver death. In a finicky society that insists on “organic” chemical-free food, “natural” products, “sustainably harvested,” “pure artesian water” and exposes a rigid no tolerance for a plethora of fillers, additives, colorings, “allergen-free” hotels, chlorine-free pools, carbon-free anything, the complete lack of comment on a extremist and physically damaging lifestyle promoted in the media by attractive celebrities is astounding.

It was eye-opening years ago, fresh out of college and full of idealism, to be planted with precisely sixteen weeks of intensive agriculture, health, nutrition and local language training into a rural rehabilitation center in Western Kenya for severely malnourished children.

A stone’s throw from Uganda, during the time of brutal dictator Idi Amin’s violent rule just across the deceptively peaceful border, this center didn’t have a single average case in it. It was marasmus and kwashiorkor, the two most dramatic forms of malnutrition and our jobs were to rehabilitate the suffering children through food, no medicines, and as we did so, to teach the mothers how to feed their children. A number of these children died, too far gone to respond to treatment. Decades later, here in the prosperous United States with food aplenty, it’s been a shock to discover the lessons learned amongst poverty, remoteness and isolation are urgently required to be taught in this abundantly fed, and famine-free, yet disturbingly physically and intellectually malnourished contemporary American society.

Simply, marasmus is the classic starvation look, stick-thin arms and legs, toddlers with faces of old men, sunken cheeks, sculpted cheek bones under stretched thin skin, teeth bared in a strained grimace, the bellies seeming to be swollen, but just holding the internal organs which don’t wither away the way fat and muscles do. Children, adults as well, with marasmus are hungry, and will eat and fairly quickly recover over time, so without other complications, prognosis is good. Marasmus is just not enough food in all categories of sustenance.

Kwashiorkor, on the other hand is something more insidious. It is a protein-calorie malnutrition, meaning the body is not getting enough of two essentials, protein, certain vitamins plus a lack of suffiicient  calories. It is marasmus without protein and the effect is even more shocking.

The human body is built to be extremely versatile to whatever environment it is subjected to. Given a well-balanced diet, a child will grow to his or her maximum potential as defined by his or her DNA. In circumstances in growth periods during childhood when food intake is reduced, the body has a number of reactive mechanisms that adjust to protect the body from disaster by slowing down the metabolism, slowing down growth, even halting actual growth.
Such cases are called, “Stunting.” The adults whose growth was stunted during childhood are far shorter than they would have been. There is nothing at all wrong with their proportions, their overall health, they are simply smaller in size, their bodies managed the low food intake against the growth demands and simply turned down the growth to turn down demands required to build bones, muscles, nerves, skin and normal repair of all of that. It is quite common to see tall children from small parents – the parents had a greater potential height, but never achieved it do to a subtle form of malnutrition during critical growth periods. Their better fed children soon tower over them.

In marasmus and kwashiorkor, the severity of lack of food is more than the body can manage through self-regulation, a physical stress exceeding the self-regulating mechanisms of the body. Stunting fails, the body in desperation begins to consume itself, fat, and then muscle. With kwashiorkor, despite a net higher availability of calories than marasmus, a lack of key proteins and vitamins results in the body unable to repair itself. The cells begin to weaken and rupture; hair becomes brittle, loses color and breaks. Leaking cells create an overall edema, a swollen total body puffy effect of pure misery for the sufferer. Deceptively, at first glance the kwashiorkor sufferer can appear “fat,” and early counseling has to lead families through their perceptions that it can’t possibly be a starvation problem as the victim eats daily.

Kwashiorkor is much more difficult to treat – the victims are listless and miserable, and what destruction is evident on the outside is also manifesting on the inside. The internal organs are in a degraded capacity to process and absorb food. In the race to save a dying person, it is a delicate balancing act of inserting as many high-quality calories as possible into a malfunctioning system without overloading it. Literally, every spoon-full must be strategic. Recovery is slower than with marasmus, as more lasting and sometimes irrevocable damage is done to the body. Alarmed parents at our rehabilitation centre would often become enraged that treatment apparently wasn’t working as the first sign that kwashiorkor is being reversed is a loss of edema as the body begins to repair its cells. The “fat” sufferer is suddenly the image of an emaciated war orphan.

What a shock it was to discover that American college health units have been reporting cases of kwashiorkor amongst students, usually girls. It seemed unbelievable that ANY health unit on any American university would even know what kwashiorkor looks like. Surely it was a mistake. How was it possible that in this land of plenty with expensive schooling, plasma screen TVs, cell phones, smart phones, vacation homes, two and three car garages … ah, back to those plasma screen TVs and what college-bound girls were absorbing from them. Sleek celebrities on talk shows, attired in designer garments, promoting their latest movies … and their diets to make themselves thin. The most rarified of these is the Vegan Diet, a total rejection of all meat, eggs and milk products.

What does one glean about the quality of American education from Kindergarten to Bachelors to hear the likes of Harvard graduate, actress Natalie Portman, a child-waif adult coo about being vegan?  One notes that India, which as a vegetarian nation with a lower GNP per capita than what Natalie Portman spends on one nice dinner out, eats actually better than she preaches, for Indians consume milk and eggs, many do eat chicken and fish. Tellingly, it’s a massive sub-continent of a billion bustling people, but still struggles to produce an athlete or team capable of snagging an Olympic gold.

Adult celebrities like Alicia Silverstone earnestly tell their audiences of the superiority of their vegan dietary lifestyle. Their hosts and hostesses nod and affirm these statements, when they should be lunging across the couches and slapping the messengers.    Few in the national audience absorbing their ignorant pronouncements have the basic background that they should have after spending most of their lives in some classroom or another about common sense dietary requirements of life. That a multimillionaire Harvard graduate could be more ignorant of what’s required to eat to survive than any uneducated village peasant should be a noticeable flaw to most people, but it isn’t.  The physical condition of thousands upom thousands of American teenage girls, smaller than their parents, thin without muscle mass, wane and waifish, doesn’t seem to catch many people’s notice, yet should.  “Robust” should be the word that people think of when they consider American youth, but that’s not often what the eye sees.

Veganism is suicide by diet, the diet to kwashiorkor. There is no getting around it. Our bodies require certain proteins and vitamins that only are obtained from animal products, through meat, milk or eggs. Denying human bodies these materials used to build and repair the core structure is a death sentence, starting with nerve die off.

Worse, an adult, a person who has finished their growth period requires less of these essential foods than a growing child or teenager. Kwashiorkor can manifest itself very quickly as growing bodies are suddenly denied critical nutrients, starting with tingling and numbness in the extremities, the warning of permanent nerve damage. Thus, perversely, adult celebrities who advocate Veganism will manifest physical damage after their gullible teenage followers begin manifesting irrevocable nerve damage as they try to copy their ignorant and irresponsible media idols.  Veganism is especially brutal for pregnant women whose bodies, denied calcium and proteins, will leech even out of the  mother’s bones and teeth the necessary building materials for the developing babies. 

In the face of this mortal danger, a wide swath of American adulthood seems enfeebled in providing life-saving leadership and informed direction to their children, shrugging off veganism as a just another “choice” amongst many choices. Yes, it is, and so is the choice to cross the railroad tracks in front of a train. How many people would leap to stop a teenager from the train, yet can’t find the inner fiber to denounce deadly veganism or even question whether a plant-only diet makes any sense whatsoever? Even the cat seems to have a better grip on the concept that there is a vast difference between a hamster and a human, and without any benefit of an Ivy League education. Is it tragic or pathetic to see a narcissist, unnecessary, self-induced malnutrition in a land of prosperity and security – a place that genuinely starving people elsewhere have yearned to go for refuge from their wretched circumstances?

Ominously, veganism is a manifestation of an ignorant and vapid culture that is losing touch with common sense, basic facts, and right and wrong. If Americans can’t even rally themselves to demand accountability from the vapid pushers of dangerous veganism, to protect the next generation from foolishly embracing malnutrition, from what reservoir of strength do Americans find the backbone to stand up against a hundred other debilitating malaises that will stunt and enfeeble the body of American leadership through families, to local, to state, to national levels of this nation to resist  illegality, corruption and narcissistic self-absorption? What a disgrace that this generation is poised to bequeath a intellectually and physically weaker nation and people out of the next generation than the one their parents bequeathed to them.