Mother Davis detects an odd glow in the Western dawn and uses the light to write,
As the United States government seeks to launch yet another war under the justification of other countries trying to build nuclear weapons, it is worth remembering the price that Americans are paying for the nuclear weapons made right here in the USA. We are all threatened by the possibility of nuclear war, but some of us here in the US are also suffering from the deadly aftermath of the very construction of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
In the Navajo Nation, located in the Southwestern United States, the US government paid for yellowcake uranium hauled out of the earth from open pit mines. Many of those mines now lay abandoned, but the uranium waste from the mines remains, not cleaned up in the slightest.
The Navajo are paying the price. They’re drinking and swimming in water contaminated with radioactive uranium. Their animals are doing the same, becoming radioactive themselves. The Navajo are already dealing with the kind of radioactivity that Homeland Security analysts worry might result from a dirty bomb some day in a speculated future.
Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, describes the underlying hypocrisy as follows: “If a fraction of the deadly contamination the Navajos live with every day had been in Beverly Hills or any wealthy community, it would have been cleaned up immediately. But a different standard applied to Navajo lands. Half-measures or outright neglect has been the official response. It’s hard to review this record and not feel ashamed. What’s happened just isn’t right.” (Source: Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, October 23, 2007)
Political insiders in Washington D.C. have failed, for generation after generation, to deal with this problem. Progressives are clamoring to make it right, and clean up the waste left behind by America’s power-hungry rush to build nuclear missiles and bombs. Progressives also support the abolition of nuclear weapons, so that the poisoning of the Navajo Nation need never occur again.
Wondering how Homeland Security can function when the home land itself is poisoned,
Mother Davis
Exactly. It’s the continuation of our wonderful treatment of the native Americans found here when our ancestors landed and started a “nation” by wiping them out, stealing their land, polluting their waters and using up their resources while writing “treaties” with them (which were always broken by the state). Oh yes – the great hypocracy lives on! Now, what was that Bush was blathering about Myanmar or China’s long history of civil rights abuse?