Prior to the atomic bomb testing that took place in the American southwest in the 1950s - 1960s, a government propaganda film was shown to the small rural communities that ranged around the bomb testing site. In that film, a kindly preacher quieted a young man’s fears about the bomb, telling him that mushroom clouds ascending to the heavens in a rainbow of colors were a wonderful sight to behold. Local people were repeatedly told that they would be safe.

“We accepted all this. It was our government and we accepted it. . . .We didn’t connect it to people’s cancer at first. It takes a while. . . .I’ve been at work on this for two years. I was concerned about it many years before that. The people of St. George, after the 1953 blast, some of the people got a little nervous. . . People had to have cars washed down . . . The AEC guys came by to soothe all the ruffled feathers. . . And yet so many people died from that. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to see it. And it’s pretty horrendous….”

If you are a Californian and the above is ringing bells for you, making you reflect on the public relations assurances, the undertone that one should be able to trust one’s government, it is doubtless because the menace of the aerial spraying of carcinogenic particulate chemicals in the LBAM/human rights crisis bears many similarities to the circumstances surrounding the testing of the A-bomb.

In both cases, communities are being assured that it is perfectly safe for human beings to be exposed to toxins.

Following the decade of atomic bomb testing, an epidemic of cancer seeped through one small community after another in the southwest. Children and adults died slow, agonizing deaths of leukemia, lymphoma, and various deadly cancers. In my own family, acute thyroid damage was present in all of the children of my mother’s generation. Mutations and birth defects became the norm for the bombed communities.

“My father and I were both morticians, and when these cancer cases started coming in I had to go into my books to study how to do the embalming, cancers were so rare,” remembered Elmer Pickett, a lifelong resident of St. George, Utah. “In ‘56 and ‘57 all of a sudden they were coming in all the time. By 1960 it was a regular flood.”

The people of the Monterey Bay Area were aerially sprayed against their will between September and November of 2007. The formula of plastic-encapsulated toxins forced on them included 2-hydroxy-4-n-octyloxybenzophenone, which causes breast cancer. The spray contained other ingredients which are known carcinogens, mutagens, and tumorgens. Every man, woman, and child in this area of central California has now been exposed to cancer-causing substances.

Unless the California Department of Food and Agriculture is ordered to cease their plans for 2008, the people of Monterey Bay will again be re-exposed to known carcinogens and the 7,000,000 people of the San Francisco Bay Area will suffer the same fate.

It relieves and heartens me to see that so many people have not forgotten the lies the government told them about the A-bomb, about DDT, about Agent Orange. It is good to see that they recognize the same voice, telling them the same lies about the latest experimentation - LBAM spray.

During the past week, I have been reading an interesting book called Miles from Nowhere by Dayton Duncan in which the author travels around the off-road places of rural America. In his journey through the southwest, he encounters the survivors of the A-bomb testing - the people who have remained alive while so many of their loved ones have died of painful cancers. In this book, Dayton quotes from the 1980 report, The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, that was issued by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, recommending that Congress,

…promptly compensate the victims of our mistakes. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s may well have been essential to secure the national defense. However, because the agency charged with developing nuclear weapons was more concerned with that goal that with its other mission of protecting the public from injury, the government totally failed to provide adequate protection for the residents of the area.

Ten years after this report was issued, the bill was passed.

In the words of one survivor who had lost a husband, a brother, and who had watched her grandchildren be born with horrific deformities,

“They couldn’t pay anyone for the loss of a child. I hope they realize that.”

Is this what it’s going to come down to?

Our government will spray our people for a decade with known carcinogens and 20 years later will admit they made a mistake?

With the level of environmental pollution we are already struggling to live inside of, with the number of diseases and cancers we already watch our loved ones dying of, does it take a decade of concentrated aerial spraying of biochemical carcinogens on human beings for government bodies to admit they have somehow failed in their job of protecting the public?

In the Light Brown Apple Moth situation, these ‘official’ people don’t even have the excuse of national security to explain away the expendability of human life and health. Their given reason for their actions is to attack a minute brown insect.

Right now, there are people across America fighting violations of human rights and offenses of gross chemical trespass. These people refuse to believe that it is safe to be subjected to toxins. What can we do in California to make a statement that will not be ignored by our own government? A statement that demands that human health be put forever above concerns for profit, international competition, and the activities of war.

We must not forget the forgotten guinea pigs. We must act for a change that will protect our lives and the health of future generations. We must tell our government that enough is enough.

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