It is with a sort of agony that I watched the DeLays – a kindly, peaceable Pacific Grove couple – relate their experiences of being sprayed with biochemicals by their own government. These are people who have gone through life working hard, taking care of family, enjoying the simple pleasures of life in their village. Listening to them talk about the poisoning of their bodies and their home felt to me something like reading about the Hobbits coming face to face with the Dark Lord.

When you listen to the stories of people like the DeLays, perhaps like me you are struck with this odd sense that deadly pesticides, political corruption, human experimentation, the toxification of food and water supplies seem so out-of-place in conjunction with such simple folk. And yet, Mike and Janis are just 2 people among millions who are having to come to grips with the fact that our government is broken, corporations are paying for the privilege of testing deadly chemicals on us for reasons we can scarcely grasp at, and that California isn’t the place we may have thought it was.

I believe we are witnessing the last of American innocence in this new century. We are hearing from our business colleagues in other countries that our government is viewed as a perpetrator of torture and terror, an Imperial conquistador-State waging wars of conquest on the innocent. We are realizing that Nixon wasn’t the big exception, but rather the odious rule in politics. We are experiencing the sinking feeling of turning for help to agencies we believed in, only to discover that the NPS, Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy are waging a quiet genocide on defenseless animals, that the FDA and USDA are filling the marketplaces with tainted food and products from dubious foreign and domestic sources, that the EPA is a menace to the environemnt, and that OEHHA and many of our public health officers are clearly being paid by someone to facilitate human testing.

Nothing we believed in is true and the world is turning upside down for millions of Californians.

What does it mean to you when an honest citizen like Mike DeLay explains that the LBAM war is one of President Bush’s 3 pet projects? Do you get that sinking feeling, that sense of something not fitting right when you hear that an American president is vastly concerned with an insect?

My hope is that the question that is springing to Californian minds hearing this is, “what is really going on here?” It’s the question we need to ask, as we revoke our trust and begin to depend more on our own powers of discernment.

The Foster Gamble Report spelled out for us the dozens of documented instances of the American government performing experiments on the American people. Why is it that something in me revolts, doesn’t want to know these things, doesn’t want to hear that my fellow beings would purposely maim women and children? Perhaps you feel like I do, and there is something inside of you that knows how much easier it is to remain unaware – the old adage of ignorance and bliss. Perhaps you want to hold on just a little bit longer to the last shreds of American innocence.

I’d be the last to blame you. Evil repels me. I want to run away from it. But then I think of Mike and Janis DeLay being evicted from their home of 40 years by a biochemical attack and I stop myself from running. If life tests us to show us what we are made of, then surely this is the test, and the challenge is to stand and fight for the basic human rights we hold dear. It’s the challenge I’m facing every day.

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