Rooting For the Future

YEARS AGO I recall the shocking item in the news that traces of jet fuel had been found in a lactating mother's breat milk, a sample of said milk having been submitted for chemical analysis for research purposes. I further reall that nobody seemed to be able to explain why jet fuel in particular, since teh woman lived nowhere near an airport, had been nowhere near jets or jet fuel to the best of here recollection. I found that particular new item quite disturbing. Not juste yesterdy, I and probably millions of other people saw a new item on one of the major television news networks that race of complex industrial chemicals, including heavy metal rear earth samples. have been detected in some grapefruit. This is even more alarming in that it raises the question: where else might such heavy duty industrial chemicals be found? The answers, which seems to be emerging, is, more alarmingly still; essentially everywhere, it seems. If my memory serves correctly, reserach scientists were even increasingly amazed and shocked at how widespread radioactive atoms have proven to be in our environment, including, most alarming of all, within and throughout our bodies, including our bloodstreams. The true story of people poisoned by radioactivity associated within the invention, development,and testing of the atom bomb in New Mexico in 1944 is no less frightening. Essentially, anyone who wea anywhere near the test sites when the bomb was tested was poisoned by radiatio from the blast, heavy metals piercing human bodies, and remaining lodged within them, for life. The United States government has handed out, after decades of litigation, millions of dollars in compensatory damages, and has gone to great lengths to downplay and cover up as much as possible the entire bizarre, terrifying episode. The first people who witnessed the first atom bomb tesing - and the United States tested dozens of nuclear bombs in the years after World War Two - were unavoidably bombarded with near lethal doses of nuclear radiation, inadequately shielded from it. I have a smart phone, which I probably use much less often than your average smart phone user. I never text anybody, don't take pictures, and don't make a lot of phone calls. And yet, I have one, and sometimes, when I hold it up to my left ear, I wonder precisely what effect if any the electromagnetic radiation going into and coming out of the phone is having on me, physiologically. Tha invisible radiation, going in one side of my head,and coming out the other. Are we really sure we know what we need to know about the impact of this on people? These super heavy "forever chemicals" are,evidently, everywhere. We have spewed all throughout the Earth's environment, including inside our own bodies, a large quantity of poisonous materials. There are no "bad" chemicals. there are only chemicals which are in the wrong place, if that's any comfort. For me personally, it isn't much comfort. Neither does it comfort me knowing that at my advanced age, I won't be alive long enough, no matter what, to actually experience personallly the worst impacts of our current and past bad stewardship of the environment. The best I can hope for is to approach death with whatever degree of solace I can derive by knowing that there are people alive now who are indeed seeking and working on solutions to our current environmental crisis. During my entire lifetime the Earth's ecosystem hung in the balance, as humans tried but failed to keep themselves from harming it. I seem destined to die without knowing the final outcome of man vs. nature, but rooting hard for my descendants to be smarter than we were.