Don't Bother Cleaning Up

Someone has to say something contrary to cleanliness.  Like rivers are polluted with soap products.  Less washing is less contamination.  The expense at which urban folk keep their dream  dachas clean can be burdensome.  Think of the money that could be saved by not buying the latest toxins everyone stores under their sink.   After eight or nine years, people could have enough in their passbook account to bribe a senator.

Maybe one out of fifty weird beard scientists will support me to the tune of:   people may be losing their immunity to illness for being too clean.  Antibodies are like Sylvester Stallone, and have to have a rigorous schedule of exercise.  They need a diet of protein rich germs.  Sylvester might pump iron, your antibodies might be playing medicine ball with some E-coli now as you watch Rocky 2 on premium access television.  It's good for people.  Even if this means the ever inconvenient case of the trots.  You're still better off in the long run.  It's an investment in the future.

Since the heart is a Luddite, and the mind is still typing on a PC, it is needed a bucolic folk tale to better sell the flick.   I grew up in the Pennsylvania farming belt, and knew many a rusticated agriculturist.  This was the 1960s and 70s, days of acid rock and rustication.

A farming hamlet, most people were aware of where food comes from.   Far from being 'dirty people,' they, most, worked close to it, planting, harvesting, handing pumpkins to Appalachian workers in trucks, and most had no fear of illness.  Religions are practical, and people considered  disease to be  a gift from the All Mighty.  Their extreme proximity to cows, horses, chickens and pigs requires they be less critical than Harvard alums about what they eat for lunch.  There's this old saying, "You have to eat a bushel of dirt before you die."

Numbers are deceiving, so are memories, and conjectures are usually a buzzard.   Rubbery statistics could show people were healthier then than now.  People were at least healthier in mind in those days.  In body, there's the argument that the medical establishment has everything under control now.  In mind, again,  there are all kinds of recent medications.  I throw this in, like a pack rat, since mental hygiene, lately, seems grubbier than the fertilizers my old friends back home so often got on their coveralls.  And it is breezily conjectured that people are more prone to illness for the American obsession with cleanliness.   I'm a dirty fellow.  You can be dirtier, too.    Like Rocky, in the film, your antibodies will beat the snot out of Dolf Lundgren.