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I've been on the go lately, and also deeply frustrated. After a visit to my mother's place for the weekend, I'm feeling exhausted and triggered from everything that happened on the weekend.
My Grandmother decided she had magically gotten better, and had decided to sell her oxygen tank. She has also stated that she still wants to drink, despite being told in no uncertain terms, that if she continued to drink, her liver would fail.
I've done what I can to try and persuade her, to coax her into looking after her health. But, she has fallen deep into the facebook new age conspiracy hole, and I'm afraid there's no coming back for her. Pseudoscience is going to kill my Grandmother.
I'll be the first to admit, I am a Witch. I grew up a practicing pagan, and it's a very important part of my life, including various herbalist traditions, ethnobotanical studies, and pharmacopoeia. I have experimented with mandrake, datura, and henbane, I have studied the chemical composition of plants, things that can heal and things that can harm, and I have come out the other end embittered by the wider witchcraft community for endangering the lives of people - turning them away from peer reviewed, scientific medicine and insisting things like crystals, collagen, and prayer will heal.
I am fucking exhausted with this rhetoric.
When do we draw the line between denialism, new age mysticism, and anti-intellectualism? Where do we draw the line. Where faith can heal liver damage, and drinking absolves you of the burden of facing yourself in the mirror. It's easier to admit that doctors lie. That natural products are better. Than it is to admit that you are dying, that you are trying to heal something the same way a child slams a toy cube into a circular shaped hole.
The misappropriation of aboriginal cultures, of eastern religions, of repackaged consumerist essential oils, all dolled up touting that they can cure cancer, that they can stop the passage of time, that they can magically cure autism. It's smoke and mirrors and consumerist ideology packaged into a sleek, minimally designed eco-friendly $80 product.
And what am I to do? Stand around as my Grandmother kills herself slowly and painfully? unwilling to admit that she needs mobility aids, unwilling to admit that she is getting older each year, that each of her decisions had led to cirrhosis of the liver, to a pulmonary embolism. To organ failure. All for her to brush it off with something more akin to 13 year olds role-playing as fairies and mythical creatures.
This is where the new age cult ends. With lives taken all for monetary gain, where spiritual enlightenment can be bought for $40 plus shipping. This is where it ends, with a child watching their Grandmother, sick with fear, saying that a crystal will heal her body. That light work will heal her body. That homemade snake oil will cure her, de-age her, and absolve the burden of facing the facts head on.
To those who have spread lies, misinformation, and other pseudo scientific bullshit, I hope you suffer a thousand deaths, I hope each day the lives you have taken in your ignorance haunt you until your dying days. I hope you are never absolved in your guilt, in your complacency, in your cultural appropriation. I hope you all fucking rot.