oh my god.
let me share a memory with yâall. itâs from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. itâs high summer. i donât remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it â wait, you donât have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i donât remember passing out, but iâm told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if iâd died, the cause of death probably wouldâve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know iâm probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish theyâd put themselves in my momâs shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, thatâs poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i canât even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didnât end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didnât boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldnât want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldnât bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich wonât even feel the extra money, theyâve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind whoâd been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just⊠the way things were.
iâm sorry. i didnât mean to longpost. itâs just. god. yâall have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until itâs too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.Â
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the âwell duhâ level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try âno hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthingâ on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
âYour regulations are written in blood.â
These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.Â
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.Â
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?Â
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Please note the recalls etc. weâre already seeing with the current US government going after those regulations, and please see Doug Ford up here trying to weaken our water safety regulations again - the last time that happened, under another Conservative government, Walkerton happened and people died. Some died quickly, some lived for years with debilitating illnesses and then died.
