By my count, we are looking at up to 450 nights of aerial pesticide spraying over the next decade. That’s up to 5 nights a month, 9 months a year for 10 years. 5×9=45×10= 450. What are some of the things duty, pleasure or plain old life might have you doing on any one of those 450 nights over the next decade?

1) Perhaps you’re an expectant mother and the night you have to go to the hospital is a spray night. Your husband tries to rush you out the car, but the spray falls on you, into your mouth and lungs. By the time you get to your doctor, you’re vomiting and can’t breathe. And what about the baby, taking his/her very first breaths of plastic-coated air? Will doctors sadly telling you that infant mortality has become oddly high in the city lately be any consolation?

2) Perhaps you’re watching your son’s little league game and it’s run a little over time. Suddenly the planes rush over the ball field and 40 ten-year-old boys become disoriented, nauseous. Some of the parents go into respiratory failure or think they are having heart attacks. Who calls 9-1-1?

3) Perhaps your apartment building gets evacuated suddenly one night because of a gas leak. 100 residents are hurrying out of the building with a few treasured possessions, planning to try to find a hotel if they can so late at night. Standing on the sidewalk, you and all your neighbors are doused with spray. Many people’s eyes are so damaged that they can’t drive, but they have to leave the building any way. Who will help you or them to find a place to stay for the night?

4) Perhaps you’re a night worker. You drive a cab, you’re a janitor, an ER nurse, a graveyard shift engineer, a truck driver. The confusion and sickness caused by the aerial spraying is causing terrible car accidents all over the cities. Getting to work and back has become like a game of Russian Roulette.

5) One of the 450 spray nights just happens to be a night one of your loved ones gets in a serious car accident. You get a call from the hospital. In order to rush to your loved one’s aid, you’ve got to run out under those planes. By the time you get to the ER, you may need to be hospitalized yourself with pesticide poisoning.

6) It’s your 25th anniversary and you’ve planned to take your wife out for a big night on the town. The CDFA has promised they aren’t spraying that night, but, as they did in Monterey, they change their minds at the last minute and panic ensues in downtown Oakland as people rush blindly from concert halls, restaurants and theaters trying to escape the rain of pesticide that is falling on their heads, searing into their skin and eyes.

7) Your dogs manage to get out of the house on one of the spray nights, despite your efforts to keep them inside. In the morning, you find them lying dead on your doorstep, and you remember those crazy-sounding stories you heard about this happening in Santa Cruz to a whole bunch of pets.

8 ) A murder happens on your street and the killer is loose somewhere in the neighborhood. Your neighbors are frantically trying to get help from the police, but the police are so tied up dealing with dozens of pesticide-induced episodes of respiratory failure that they simply can’t get to the crime scene quickly. The police force has become critically understaffed because 1/3 of the officers are sick from pesticide poisoning. The killer gets away.

9) Your friend is dying in the Bay Area and you want to be at their bedside to say a last goodbye, but you learn that the pesticide spraying is happening this week in the City and you’re trying to recover from cancer. You have to make a choice. Go to the City and risk your own life, or let your friend die alone. How can you choose?

10) A disaster happens in the Bay Area - a fire, an earthquake, the collapse of a hillside. Thousands of people are homeless, but the pesticide planes have to keep on flying in their obsessive pursuit of a bug. You step out the flap of a Red Cross tent and feel the pesticide mist cover your face as you stand amidst the wreckage of your life.

These kinds of things happen to someone just about every night in a place as populous as the SF Bay Area. The vagaries of life pretty much guarantee that something unexpected is going to happen to you on 1 of 450 nights.

And that is one of the great evils of assault, of war. It happens to everyday people who are just trying to go about their normal lives. Like pawns in a game of chess, we are seen as the most expendable factors while official people and their corporate friends are engaged in making fortunes. Programs, plans and systems have no care for the needs, the hopes, the dreams, the emergencies, the fears or the life of the individual.

We can see the spraying as affecting a mass - millions - but really, it will affect us one by one, in millions of ways.

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