Yesterday, hundreds marched across the Golden Gate Bridge in protest of the proposed and illegal spraying of human beings with aerial chemicals which experts say will destroy human health. LBAMSpray.com has some great photos. The bridge march was a bright idea. Not only did it do much to galvanize the efforts of Bay Area families who are working tirelessly in an effort to defend themselves, but it also alerted anyone driving across the bridge yesterday to the seriousness of this dire issue.

We need more bright ideas like this.

Just yesterday, Dr. Anne Haiden explained on Joanie Greggains’ KGO radio program that one of the spray ingredients – BHT – is used by vivisectionists to create massive tissue damage in the lungs of lab animals. This is the substance CDFA and the USDA intend to force 7 million Californians to breathe day after day, month after month, for years and years. And, it is just one of the ingredients in the toxic spray compound which cause both short-term and chronic harm to living beings. CDFA’s LBAM ‘program’ is an unforgivable assault on public health and our doctors are calling it the most colossal government blunder that will have been made in modern times. In other words – this is real, this is dangerous and it demands a response from any Californian who values health and life.

But what is that response to be?

Over the months, I have been engaged in countless conversations with Californians who are working from an amazing variety of angles to stop the spray. Some are acting with science data, medical data, legal data, environmental data, humanitarian data and so on. Every morning, I wake up with the question in my mind, “what can I do?” and I know from many of my readers that you are having the same experience.

As I see it, we have 2 issues to face here.

1) Many of our Neighbors Still Don’t Know About The Spray Or Don’t Realize It’s Going to Sicken Kill People

Potential Bright Ideas:

- What would it cost for city councils in each of the cities set to be bombarded to send a letter to every household, giving perhaps a 10 point bulleted list regarding the spray? CDFA intends to send out little post cards right before they start their assault on the cities. Can city councils take a preemptive action to warn their neighbors of the spray and ask them to join the fight against it?

- City and town Mayors and Supervisors have been some of the most outspoken heroes in defense of the people of their communities. What would it cost to hire a couple of trucks, hang them with signs regarding the spray, get a volunteer driver and equip the Mayor or Supervisor with a loudspeaker to announce basic information about the spray? If this was done after normal workday hours, it would bring people out of their homes like the ice cream man does and fliers could be handed out to the community, again informing them of the reality of the spray and asking them to join the fight.

- Millions and millions of people live in the spray zone. Does ANYONE have ANY connections with television, public or otherwise, or the money to invest in TV time? Political candidates are able to run tons of ads at campaign time. Are any philanthropists in Marin, San Francisco, Sonoma County, Santa Cruz, Monterey, or any of the other cities willing to use their funding to inform Californians of the reality of the spray via a television advertisement? If I had the means, I can’t think of a better way to let millions of people know what is happening.

These are just 3 suggestions. I am asking you, my readers, to please use the comments field to brainstorm and make other suggestions for how we can let EVERYONE know what the spraying will mean to their hopes for a future, for health, for life.

2) Once People Know About The Spray, They Don’t Know What To Do
Great efforts have been made to invite people to sign John Russo’s Stop the Spray petition. Some 27,000 people have signed it. I so applaud this effort. And yet, after people have taken this step, what is there for them to do?

The Gandhi method of protest basically hinged on the concept that the opponent, being a moral being, will turn away from his evil actions if he is repeatedly forced to face the reality of them. Gandhi led marches, inspired thousands to risk and endure physical harm, enacted hunger strikes and employed other non-violent methods of protest that forced the British Empire to stare at the chaos and disaster they were causing Indians. First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, Gandhi said, and he succeeded in forcing the British Empire to withdraw from India.

Californians have experienced the being laughed at part already. Our own agencies are sneering in the faces of the hundreds of families who have been severely damaged by the 2007 spray and are winking at the millions who will be sickened by the impending spray of 2008. We have been subjected to lie after lie in the mouths of incompetent, corrupt agencies regarding the ‘dangers’ of an insect and the ‘safety’ of spraying pesticide on human beings. The arrogance, condescension and derision we have met with in our public servants – the governor and the CDFA/USDA – has been very hard to listen to. So, we’ve been laughed at.

Now comes the fighting part, according to Gandhi. For this non-violent man, fighting did not mean buying guns and swords in order to fight the opponent with his own weapons. It meant shaming the opponent by steadfastly speaking and showing the truth of the immorality of his aggressive actions against the innocent.

Likewise, for most of the people I’ve spoken with, fighting the CDFA does not mean hiring Homeland Security airplanes and Suterra Pesticides so that we can fly them over our opponents houses and sicken their families, as they intend to do to us. It means finding ways to publicly shame them.

And yet, this is where I find myself missing Mohandas K. Gandhi. He believed in the basic morality of his opponents. I believe I have lost faith in the picture of these agencies as ethical. As our friends and neighbors have revealed, the American government has been guilty of performing at least 30 experiments on its own people since the Industrial Revolution, and the government doesn’t deny this. We are facing an evil here, an utter amorality, the like of which can only be compared to the darkest works of scientists employed by the darkest governments the world has ever known. Anyone who takes a job, the nature of which, is to spray deadly chemicals on infants has, I fear, lost touch with what any sane person considers moral thought. When I listen to the robotic, stone-faced message coming from CDFA/USDA, we will spray you, I am increasingly finding that I lack Gandhi’s belief that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, A.G. Kawamura, Steve Lyle and their colleagues are moral beings.

If the specter of baby Jack Wilcox’s heart stopping in the ER after he had inhaled checkmate isn’t keeping these men awake at night, if our entreaties not to attack innocent people with biochemicals are falling on deaf ears, what paths do we have left to us?

I think private citizens may only be left with the power of public shame. While lawyers and scientists and doctors continue to publish reports, warning CDFA that their plans are reckless, unwarranted and illegal, maybe we can do something, too. But how can we best let CDFA/USDA and the governor who has allied himself with these agencies rather than Californians know that they are not operating in a vacuum. That they cannot quietly assault and sicken 7 million people with impunity. That the eyes of the world are upon them?

Potential Bright Ideas:

Family and friends in other states and countries who care about you could do much to begin alerting their cities and countries to what is happening in California. Can you ask you international loved ones and Internet friends to begin campaigns where they live to get their groups and governments to condemn the actions of CDFA/USDA and Gov. Schwarzenegger? Imagine if European countries began sending letters and news articles to the United States upbraiding them for this evil attack on innocent people? What is happening here deserves to be world news and this will fight off the danger that we can be silently assaulted with no one in the world the wiser.

Embracing the principles of non-violent non-cooperation, villages in South America have turned out in the streets banging pots and pans to protest injustices. Just banging pots and pans. Drawing the eye of the world to their lands and shaming their governments. Imagine the streets of San Francisco teeming with pan-drumming citizens while the cameras are rolling and the world is watching ‘upwardly mobile’ city professionals roaming their neighborhoods demanding that no one spray biochemicals on them. It would make the reality of the situation very clear, very quickly.

Strikes have long been an effective measure of gumming up the smooth operations of daily life on which agencies like the CDFA depend. Imagine a day in Oakland where no one went to work, no buses ran, no taxis, no BART, no business going on in the highrises, no interactions with Wall Street. Imagine the entire Bay Area workforce saying that protecting public health is worth going on strike for. Imagine Governor Schwarzenegger, sitting at his nice desk, fielding calls from the NY Times demanding to know how he intends to respond to the workers striking in protest of being assaulted with biochemicals.

One by one, doctors from up and down the state have written reports, attended meetings, spoken on the radio regarding the chronic and fatal damage that will be done to infants, children, women, elders, sick people and others by this pesticide. Imagine if these doctors could be gotten together in a single body and demanded a press conference with every major media source in the state of California. Imagine the picture of 20, 30, 50, 200, 1000 doctors standing at microphones saying, “this pesticide will cause human fatality. The government will be guilty of causing deaths.”

These are just a couple of ideas. Please, I am asking all of you, my smart readers, to use the comments field to start brainstorming. How can we get the attention we need from the world in a manner that will so shame our corrupt politicians and agencies, with the spotlight of notoriety shining full in their faces, so that they will be forced to halt this horrific plan? We have so little time left. We need some really good ideas.