As a country, we are freaked out about Islamic terrorists killing us in our beds or our fellow citizens in San Bernardino or Ft. Hood. It’s an ugly sign of the times, but hardly an existential threat any more than the SLA or anarchists were in earlier times. We will survive.
By contrast, we really are under regular assault from a more pervasive, insidious enemy that is waging chemical and biological warfare on us daily. Far more Americans are affected than ISIS can dream of hurting. That’s because the malefactors are our employers and our elected officials. In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I know what you’re thinking. Oh no, a tree hugger rant. Not exactly, but even if you think a little mess now and then is the price of doing business ( and as quiet Cal said – “the chief business of the American people is business,” something like the tainting of the Flint, Michigan water supply has to give you pause. This approaches Chinese-scale befouling of the environment.
Daily, Americans are being killed, injured or sickened by friendly fire. In Flint, an entire American city finds itself without a potable water supply, something that hasn’t been true in this country for a century and it reeks of the Third World. The pipes are so toxic that even a pristine water source run through them will now be poisoned without a retrofit costing billions that the city can’t and state won’t afford.
Gov. Rick Snyder is a classic contemporary villain for such a piece, a Republican businessman and entrepreneur – M.B.A., J.D., C.P.A. He’s an accounting company and computer start-up technocrat contemptuous of fuddy-duddy government who was elected on a promise to use “shared sacrifice” to balance the budget, create jobs and spur growth. In the process he appointed emergency managers to serve as his satraps, running troubled cities in lieu of elected officials. Desperate times call for undemocratic measures, he argued.
One of these local tools decided the toxic Flint River water would be cheaper to tap for drinking water than the reliable source it had been using, even though the river was so toxic that the GM plant that helped pollute it would no longer use it because it ruined company machines. Meek protests from environmental protection agencies were ignored. All complaints were blamed on the governor’s political enemies. The result is that the health of a lot of Americans has been undermined by lead poisoning, courtesy of the can-do Snyder administration. It is not clear which part of the sacrifice the governor and his family have shared in. Too bad Erin Brockovich isn’t around to bring him and his loved ones a refreshing glass of water.
If this were a one-off it would be terrible. As business as usual it’s terrifying. Oil trains derail, blowing whole towns off the map. In my adopted state, rivers are poisoned by ash from Duke Power electric plants and Gov. Pat McCrory, a longtime Duke executive, gives his cronies a slap on the wrist.
In California an ongoing methane leak spews billows of poison gas into air breathed by millions. Atomic sites in several states are so irradiated that they may never be habitable again and the radioactive waste leaches into the ground water. They used to make science fiction movies with mutants about this sort of thing, but this isn’t fiction.
And the list could be expanded almost without end. Oils spills from Alaska to the Caribbean, exploding fertilizer plants, poisoned meat, pharmaceuticals and produce at your grocery, drugstore or nearby Chipotle Mexican Grill. When I was young the Cuyahoga River ignited. They’ve cleaned that up since the heavy industry along its banks has decamped to Asia, but most experts agree you take your life into your hands to eat freshwater fish almost anywhere in the industrialized world. Bees die, species die, and we die.
And then there is the ancient infrastructure of our country that played a supporting role in Flint. Much is so decayed by decades of deferred maintenance that the failures are daily and the cost to repair it now astronomical. Bridges collapse taking commuters on their final trip. Sewers collapse. Water mains burst. Make your own list.
Businessmen turned “public servants” like Snyder and McCrory would never have allowed the power plants or computer factories that made them prosperous fall into such dire condition but, as anti-tax, anti-regulation pols, refusing to care for our country is an article of faith. After all, you can’t trust government so why invest in it? And the more such government haters are elected, the more their prophecy will be self-fulfilled.
You certainly can’t trust a government run by people dedicated to neglecting it to death. And yet, aren’t we are all together in being victims of such behavior? Libertarians and socialists alike eat the same food, breath the same air, and drink the same water.
Or do we? That used to be the case. Today it’s probably naïve to think so. The ruling class, at least, appears to think that only expendable minority children are in danger of being lead poisoned, only backward islanders are in danger of sinking beneath the rising waters of climate change. Those is power imagine themselves safe, sipping bottled water on the golf courses of their gated communities.
They may even be right to consider themselves immune to the laws of man and nature in our increasingly medieval times. The peasantry can expect little help from the distant nobles, their boughten governors, courts or sheriffs. Their victims are left to pray that Snyder, McCrory, Duke, GE, BP, PG&E and the rest will get their just deserts in the afterlife. Given the tenor of our times, they have probably already reserved their private skyboxes in the appropriate circle of hell.