The Complete Patient

Greg Niewendorp's act of civil disobedience--and that is what is going on here--has stimulated a great deal of emotion, witness the comments from my original Thursday posting. Which is as it should be, since civil disobedience is at once an act of desperation and an act of dignity. It is the last option of desperate people standing up against overwhelming power, usually in the face of public apathy. Yet to the powers that be it is the most terrifying of tactics because it has the potential of stirring up the masses to such an extent that their wishes cannot be ignored.

The most recent example of civil disobedience in our experience occurred during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Desperate people stood up and the government quaked. Suddenly government flexibility that had seemed so distant became a reality as Martin Luther King and his followers pressed on in the face of overwhelming force.

Like the Civil Rights activists, Niewendorp is standing up to a government arrogant in its refusal to acknowledge and deal with injustice. I chronicled a snapshot of that arrogance in my posting about the open hearing in January of Michigan Department of Agriculture commissioners--going through the motions of listening to complaints about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), but really not hearing anything that was being said.

The injustice of NAIS, as many of the comments suggest, is that it forces small farms to adopt the practices of a system they not only want no part of (the factory agriculture system), but that they find abhorrent to their way of doing business. The real purpose of NAIS is to reassure the international marketplace that our meat is safe. If that is what the mega-farms need, let them partake of the system. But don't force small farms selling their products locally and direct to consumers into the straitjacket of globalization. Surely it is possible to draft regulations that exempt farms smaller than, say, 100 head of cattle, 3,000 chickens, and so forth.

The comments from "David" raise the old tired issue of "protection," as in, "Trust me, the government, with all your most personal and intimate secrets, and I'll provide you with the wonderful technology that will keep you safe." It sounds so soothing. Who could possibly be against protectiing our citizens, especially our children, from illness? It is the same argument the FDA and USDA give us all the time to justify heavy-handed actions against raw milk and cherry farmers, alternative health care practitioners, and ordinary consumers seeking merely to exercise their right to consume the foods they want. It is a view filled with wish fulfillment: if only you do what we tell you, you'll finally achieve the nirvana of risk-free eating. No food will ever make you sick again. 

Unfortunately, this view neglects to allow for our rights as individuals to make choices about what we'll eat and where we'll obtain the food. It also fails to acknowledge the willingness of owners of small farms and their customers to self police, and to assume the risks that comes with such self policing. in other words, if I want to buy Greg Niewendorp's beef, knowing it hasn't been tested for bovine TB and knowing his cattle don't wear RFID tags, I should have that right.