If you don't sell or buy Roundup, you are a Democrat.

I went into my local irrigation supply store, Aquaflow, the other day. While at the counter purchasing a few items, another customer came in and asked another employee;

“Do you sell Roundup?”

You probably know of Roundup, a glyphosate based herbicide previously produced by Monsanto, now acquired by the Bayer company. Roundup is the most globally used herbicide. Currently a Judge in California has ruled that Roundup did cause a garden workers’ cancer.

Glyphosate is produced by heating a mixture of phosphorous acid and a-amino acetic acid, and then adding formaldehyde. Any of these ingredients ingested at certain levels will cause health problems, even cancer, and there’s plenty of studies out there showing that Glyphosate is in most of our food and water.

I won’t quote all the statistics on how much Glyphosate has been sprayed, except that since 1974, when Roundup was first released, the US has sprayed, over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient, or 19 % of the estimated global use of glyphosate.

Back to my story. The employee responded to the question “Do you sell Roundup”;

“We are pesticide and herbicide free”

Now I don’t know if he meant, they didn’t stock these items or he was making a statement about the companies viewpoint on these products. The customer responded;

“Oh, so you’re a Democrat then”

I looked around at the man and said;

“No, he’s a human being”

What I really wanted to say was, so you’re a moron then? But I have learned from my past, generally it’s better if i don’t say what comes to my mind first.

When I stated that the employee was a human being I was stating the obvious. If I were that employee I would be very insulted. Whenever someone tries to put you in a box, someone that barely has spoken more than five words to you, from which they then decide who you vote for or where you stand on an issue, it’s insulting. This is where we are now. Two political parties divide our lives, the products we buy and our understanding. When these kind of small details happen, there is no difference between what happened to the Jewish people in Germany, or the current crisis of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

This may sound sensational but this behavior is a sign of extremist ideology. To think that only two types of people exist, Democrats and Republicans, is ludicrous. Lets not even address the fact that these two parties only represent a fraction of US voters, combined with the fact that most Americans don’t vote. Lets not even talk about how even within these parties they can’t find common ground. For a person to determine and judge another based on the fact they either don’t sell or don’t wish to sell a product is strange to say the least. It’s not that strange though. Every day i’m reminded of the absurdity of ideas and concepts. Somehow we believe that a Democrat or a Republican knows best. Somehow we allow others to determine our viewpoints. It reminds me of World War I, and the trench warfare, where young men were sent over the trenches by powerful generals sipping tea far away from the battle. A senseless war in which many blindly and willing died to try to gain a few meters of land, while the so called leaders sat in their tents as if nothing had changed for them. Is this what it means to be a human being? To blindly follow the ideology of others, while judging those around you for not thinking the same. We are more than this.

We hold the whole universe inside us. We live on a planet in space, spinning. We need to remind each other of these facts, because to lose ourselves in other peoples ideas of what we should be, or how we should label ourselves, or how we should live, is a cultural disaster. You only have to look at the recent shenanigans surrounding the groping of a woman on a plane and the perpetrator saying it was fine because Trump “says it’s ok”, to see where this is going. Let the bigots speak, and the bullies overpower you with their ignorance and the world will be a nasty place to live in, if it doesn’t feel like it’s going there already. If you don’t know what it means to be a human being, maybe time spent investigating this aspect of your life would be better spent then trying to define each and every individual by someones else’s set of standards.