I love cheese, don’t you? Cheese, of course, is made from the milk of strange-looking four-legged mammals with big eyes and dull horns who live in concentration camps scattered around the countryside. You know — dairy cows. Chances are that the cow who made the milk to make my cheese gets injected with growth hormones to speed up milk production and raise profitability. This also means the poor old cow gets dosed with loads of antibiotics to treat the impacts of added stress.

The name midwife means “with woman.” Midwives have always been in charge of delivering babies, ever since the beginning of human existence, all the way up to about 150 years ago in the United States. That was when a small group of medical doctors decided to launch a war against midwifery, having unilaterally decided that medical doctors were better suited to the job than midwives.

Stalwart American corporations have been hard at work ever since, pursuing new ways to penetrate the chain link fence that surrounds the schoolyards of America, attempting to exploit that juicy, enticing market. Think of it, millions of children held captive inside, all of them just dying to buy something five days a week, nine months of the year!

Have you ever wondered who originally came up with the cruel idea of placing thirty children in a single school classroom day after day, week after week, with only one adult in charge? If you have observed a classroom in session, you know for certain that the majority of the children, particularly the boys, are just barely able to keep a lid on their natural instincts to leap out of their chairs and yell crazy stuff at the top of their lungs while hurling erasers, tennis shoes and apple cores at the girls.

This week, my son John graduated from high school. There we sat in the stadium bleachers, my wife and I, crying, laughing, and feeling every shade of emotion in between. We were surrounded by hundreds of other proud parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and grandmothers of every shape and size all crying, laughing and getting emotional right along with us.