I've been writing a science fiction story. In my story, the "Mutant Uprising" came about because corporations were irresponsible and polluted the earth. To give my story realism, I decided to look up Wikipedia and make every nuclear and chemical spill incident a mutant-creation event.
The results startled me. You’ll find the overwhelming list below in this story. It’s not a comprehensive list...it really got too depressing after a while. But I included the smattering of Wikipedia articles that I found and I knew, I knew that this can’t be all that’s ever happened.
I knew that corporations polluted the earth and that as a human with a conscious, I was against that. Did I do anything about it? No, not really.
Then it occurred to me: this is why our world is messed up.
Our family members are dying because they have cancer because corporations are allowed to pollute the earth. How many people do you know who either have cancer or died from it? The corporations, through the mass media, will have you believe that cancer “just happens.”
Nothing just happens.
We have asthma and allergies because of the chemicals corporations put into the air. How many people do you know have food or airborne allergies for which they have to take a daily drug? I would bet it’s more than half the people you can think of off the top of your head.
Did you know food is getting more expensive? We have a food shortage because the bees are dying because the corporations are polluting. We have species dying because why should the corporations care about fish and frogs when there are people to buy products? Did you know that chocolate, real chocolate, might be a thing of the past?
Oh, the corporations have lawyers and law makers on their side. They will argue and tell you it’s not their fault, it’s not one particular evil corporation that is the cause. They are right because it’s ALL of them. The people who make fertilizer from oil aren’t thinking about the people who make aerosol sprays, why should they when the almighty dollar is the bottom line? The people who make paint aren’t concerns with what the drug companies are putting out. Why think globally? Think profit! Screw the 7th generation!
The chemicals extruded as waste from the plants mix together in ways their scientist never imagined. It’s why the world is sick.
You and I, we are the 7th generation from the Industrial Revolution. We live a fast, weird life compared to our great-great-great-great-great-grandparents and we are dying by inches. The wild, untouched country is no longer untouched by the insidious tendrils of pollution. There is no longer an unpolluted landmass, not even Antarctica. This isn’t fiction. This is what the corporations are hiding from us, from everyone.
The government aids and abets the corporations, because individual politicians are bribable. The US EPA has no teeth. It seems no one in our current government is thinking of the big picture, no one person is big enough to stop that evil, the evil of simple greed.
But I think you and I are, if there are enough of us. Statistically speaking, there are.
The Occupy Wall Street movement taught us a couple of useful bits of knowledge. First off, the clarity of the message and goal is all-important. Choosing mature leaders who present themselves well to the media helps.
Second, people are jerks. This was seen in the disdain from the bulk of the population for anything that stretched their thinking outside their comfort zone. The Occupy movement had the task of telling Middle-Class America that Greed is Bad. This message is in direct conflict with the corporation’s (through the mass media) 200 year old message that Greed is Good and the further message our own brains give us. Humans aren’t natural predators; we don’t have claws or venomous teeth. Physically speaking almost every animal on the planet can outrun, out-fight and basically out-kill us. We survived as a species because of our “inventing” instinct, which partially stemmed from the hunter-gatherer method of survival. That method is based on the theory “If I have a lot of stuff, my family will survive.” There was no need for frugality because scarcity of nutrition was the primary hurdle to survival. Americans can’t see that we don’t have to think that way anymore, indeed, we’re killing ourselves with obesity from eating the fake food that has no real nutritional value.
The “people are jerks” was also seen in the people that the Occupy movement attracted. When any new community is started you will see that people are in it for themselves. Someone will have his or her own agenda; someone will want something for nothing.
It didn’t work that way here in Cleveland, Ohio quite by accident: FBI agents infiltrated the group and arrested a couple of hot heads by inciting them to try to blow up a bridge. I believe their goal was to obtain a way the police could arrest people of suspicious activity, get the Occupy movement out of the eye of the media. The local and national news then tried to paint the rest of the Cleveland Occupy movement with that “terrorist” brush but it didn’t stick because the leaders of the movement simply weren’t there. (Thank you, FBI, for taking the people who didn’t share their blankets or their food, and who really didn’t “get” that Occupy’s purpose was to bring attention to the fact that Greed is Bad. Occupy never wanted to harm anyone. The movement’s goal was to highlight the sins of the corporations and the status quo. But we can’t have Middle Class America waking up now, can we.)
So there’s our fight. We’re fighting an enemy that kills us secretly, who has the power to change laws and control the media, who can’t be narrowed down to only one person. Before you say to me “how can we win? What does winning even look like?” I will tell you this. Winning looks like no errant chemicals or radiation, no disease, no allergies, enough food for all, and everyone healthy. It may not happen in our lifetime. The situation is so far gone that this dream may not happen for 7 more generations, but if we don’t start now and if we don’t hold onto this ideal as hard as the greedy people held onto theirs…it will never happen.
We need to wake the world from this insanity.
I leave you with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. He said “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
Stay strong.
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Notes:
Notice how tidy and neat this is, how immediate deaths are highlighted and then no follow up. If an event is small enough (19 or less deaths), there is little to no follow-up. No one even thinks to ask how the surrounding environment was affected.
More research needed: UK Chemical Reaction Hazards Forum http://www.crhf.org.uk/
How many fish kills go unreported by the national news, too small to make the headlines? http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1997 a phosphate plant in Mulberry, Florida, accidentally dumped 60 million gallons of acidic process water into Skinned Sapling Creek, reducing the pH from about 8 to less than 4 along 36 miles of creek, resulting in the death of about 1.3 million fish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
It’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The Four Big Pollution Diseases of Japan:
1912--Itai-itai disease. Kamioka Mines, 1910. Cadmium poisoning. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1920, arsenic production at Toroku—other arsenic pollution incidents follow:
Namikata Machi, Ehime Prefecture, discovered in 1933, called the black baby incident. The cause remains unknown.
Nishikawa Machi, Niigata Prefecture, discovered in 1955, Pollution due to disposal of agricultural drugs
Chujo Machi, Niigata Prefecture, discovered in 1959, Caused by 75 year pollution of waste of a factory, Resulting in lung cancers
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1956, April 21st—first instance of Minamata Disease discovered in Japan. Chisso Corporation, founded 1908. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1956--Yokkaichi asthma. Showa Yokkaichi Oil, Daichi Petrochemical Complex. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1964, autumn--Niigata Minamata disease discovered. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The 1968 Yushō disease didn’t make the list. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1984, December 2nd and 3rd—Bhopal disaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/... Union Carbide India Limited founded 1934. Owned by of Union Carbide Corporation, founded 2001? Subsidiary of Dow Chemical, founded 1897. http://en.wikipedia.org/... Dow has some responsibility for 96 of the United States' Superfund toxic waste sites, placing it in 10th place by number of sites. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
See also Superfund Alternative Sites—sites that are toxic but didn’t make the cut.
Radiation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
1917 to 1926--http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
You can read all day about how humans are killing the planet. These are only the ones that the corporations couldn’t hide.