Consider the grave of a child -- my child, flowers at her feet, picture frozen in time....
her favorite things....
mouldering around her, mouldering with her....
irises overgrown, pink roses lost over twenty-three seasons, twenty-three birthdays she never had.
Katherine was my rose who never bloomed, unbearably beautiful and brilliant....and she wanted so much to live. She fought for every day. She wanted to finish learning cursive. She wanted to hear me read the end of Little Women. She wanted to adopt a baby "so she could watch it grow." Surely, I would have been a grandmother by now. And she did not perish from chance or fate. She was killed in the bud by industries that were willing to sacrifice her one precious life for ever more bloody lucre.
Those same industries are now dancing on her grave. They have captured our entire political system and are dismantling the meager protections we once had. They have swindled and bought voters. They are undermining democracy, handing it over to oligarchs. They are demolishing science and defunding the very scientists I am interviewing here, scientists working to establish connections between toxic exposures and skyrocketing childhood diseases, and thereby prevent them.
It is not difficult to see what is happening as these corporations work to squeeze the last drops of money and power out of their dying industries while they can, even though doing so is killing children and destroying the only planet on which humans have ever existed. Even Katherine could see what they were doing was wrong -- she experienced these exposures, she endured the daily suffering of her dread disease. What she couldn't understand was how people could poison children. "Mommy," she asked me, "don't they love their children?" I suppose many of the people making these terrible decisions, responsible for the deaths of so many, think it will be other people's children. But it is only a matter of time before it is everyone's child. Certainly one measure of a society -- and of an individual -- is the degree to which they are willing to poison children for profit. Judgment day awaits.
