Evil Infection Cloth

Reader, you know I love posts about unintended consequences, in fact here’s one from this very blog-smith back in 2012 so if you’re tired of that stop reading. No wait! (nervous laughter) just kidding. I need this blog traffic to help build the ol’ self esteemo’ so keep reading. In fact, just to show you my level of devotion to you guys (and seven female readers) if you click here, you can qualify for a free car compliments of There’s Free Cheese In Every Mousetrap *offer expired. I suppose the reason I find stories of unintended consequences so adorable is that it illustrates perfectly how people in charge can really bollocks up other people’s lives even when they have the best of intentions. And thus we can make the assumption that you should always view those in charge with an ever vigilant stink eye. It doesn’t make you a crank to look at some great plan or piece of legislation put forth by your wise overlords and ask “But what if this happens, or this, or this?”

Let’s first talk about grocery bags and then we’ll move on to prison love.

Look we’re officially pretty green here at the Free Cheese. I write this blog in five-minute bursts between recharges of my laptop with a solar trickle charger bought at a rummage sale and that’s why it takes me so long to complete my posts. I love the earth and many of the females that inhabit it. I’m also a serious tightwad and that can often go hand in hand with being green. So my street cred’ (do young ragamuffins still say that?) with the environmentalists is solid. For a short time I was even in an environmentally conscious, but tragically named street gang, the Girl-Scout Boys. In retrospect it’s amazing that name even made it out of our first brainstorming session but it did and I have the satin jacket to prove it.

With all that being said, it stands to reason that I’m okay with reusable shopping bags. I don’t particularly like when politicians outlaw the plastic bags but tyrants will be tyrants and I can’t fight all the brush fires. And who wants a drawer full of the plastic bags in your kitchen anyway? Nota Bene * The one time you don’t want to use a reusable shopping bag is when you’re taking your dog for a walk and find yourself cleaning up the mess. No sir, even the greenest of all the green weenies will tell you plastic is the way to go in that situation as no one wants to reuse a bag that contained an undetermined number of steamy dog logs.

And that lovely thought sort of sets up what I’m about to talk about. You see, I’ve been eating food my whole life so I go the supermarket just like regular people. However, when people are using those cloth shopping bags, and saving the planet and what not, they often don’t realize they’re creating a mini microbiology lab right there in their home.

Let’s say you put some veggies, a few jars of pickled herring, a carton of smokes, and one of those styrofoam boats with a few chicken thighs in the cloth bag. Okay, fair enough, you make sure it’s layered right so you don’t crush the Winstons, and then off you go back to your swanky pad. Unknown to you there could be a pinhole in the chicken container or even just raw chicken juice on the outside of the package and the next thing you know, while you’re smoking a cig and cleaning up the dinner dishes, feeling pretty good about yourself the whole time, ol’ mister salmonella is making a home in the cloth bag you crumpled up and jammed in the drawer. A study by the University of Arizona found that cloth shopping bags were acting as abandoned buildings and were being turned into shooting galleries by deadbeats like salmonella, E. coli, and coliform bacteria who lay around in there on dirty mattresses, procreate, and may eventually find their way not into your heart but into your gut. And not only is a kitchen drawer a great place for them to grow and learn but a nice warm car, where a lot of people apparently leave their empty bags, is a nice spa-like environment that does wonders for the wee beasties. So while I get the idea behind the cloth bags, please Free Cheesers be careful with your sacks. Good advice in just about any situation.

Now let’s turn to prisons. It makes perfect sense that when we’re worried about junior running with the wrong crowd we want to try to steer him in a different direction so he doesn’t end up in an olde English style gaol. Therefore it makes perfect sense that we can use hardened convicts (sometimes literally) to “scare him straight.” I mean who would go into a prison, get screamed at by a bunch of thugs, and come out thinking that this is the kind of place where they want to spend their dreamy days and nights? Well, apparently the people who go through the scared straight programs.

Yes, the god of unintended consequences once again rears his rather ugly, kudzu crowned head, as he sits on a low flush toilet while munching on a bag of Olestra saturated chips. Ah ha! Forgot about Olestra™ didn’t you? Remember it was supposed to be a fat substitute that would revolutionize our snacking habits and make eating junk food worry free? Well, that is until people started noticing they were running to the john a lot more after consuming the stuff. It actually led to a label being placed on foods containing Olestra that read: “This Product Contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools.” Oh Jesus pass the Cheetos! I mean hand them over, I’ll pass them myself in about thirty minutes.

Anyweight, back to the prison part of this post. Like I was saying before that totally gratuitous paragraph above, the so-called “scared straight” programs, that we all love to laud while secretly taking satisfaction from the fact that some juvenile delinquent somewhere is peeing his/her pants while coming in close contact with incarcerated incarcerants, (spell check just slapped my face) unfortunately don’t seem to actually work. Intuitively they seem like they would work but numerous studies (I’ve done some myself while wearing a white lab coat) show that rather than steer juveniles away from crime these programs…….you know it…………..actually make kids more likely to end up in prison by almost 13%. You can read a cheeky little article about it here.

But why? You wonder as your instinct still tells you that scared straight will undoubtedly work. There’s a number of theories but one is that when adults go to great lengths to tell you how bad something is and how you should stay away from it many teenagers are naturally curious as to what all the fuss is about. “Pip, pip and What Ho! Maybe it’s time I give this life-of-crime thing a whirl!” Or perhaps when you get these groups of teens together they tend to want to impress each other far more than they want to impress any adults so they decide they’d better thug up and show that they’re not going to fall for some program set up by a bunch of geezers. Regardless, the data shows that these programs don’t work and are thus another example of the unintended consequence bugbear.

One of my commenters dared me to use bugbear in a post so there it is. I will now collect and collate my hate mail.

H.R. Gross