Death by Toxins: A Preventable Plague

16 December 2007

Yesterday we buried my Uncle Claiborne, who died after a protracted battle with mesothelioma. This disease, caused by working with asbestos, has affected or killed an enormous number of former employees of the Newport News Shipyard (of which Uncle Claiborne was one). Claiborne had to have his lung removed nearly two years ago, and has been struggling to regain his strength and quality of life ever since. Two weeks ago, his doctors at Duke University Medical Center discovered that the mesothelioma had spread to his stomach. Uncle Claiborne could no longer eat at all; because he had diabetes, he couldn’t be given glucose. We are all grateful that he went quickly and didn’t linger to literally starve to death.

The shocking thing about this is that the Newport News Shipyard still operates, and still uses asbestos. Victims of mesothelioma are receiving huge financial settlements—as will Aunt Priscilla and her two grown children—but what is any amount of money to the loss of husband and father? Although shipyard employees now use all manner of protective clothing and masks, still, they, like nuclear facility employees, are constantly exposed to this poison. Mesothelioma has attacked people who never worked at or went to the shipyard, but only handled the clothes of or simply lived in the house with shipyard employees. Should not such a deadly and far-reaching poison be banned—shouldn’t ship builders (and here we’re talking about military contractors, in Newport News anyway) find alternative materials to those that cause this incurable and devastating disease?

The materials used to make surfboards, once deemed toxic to the environment and to people who work with them, were banned. Surfboards are still being built; makers have experimented with and found several other options to the toxic materials.

But surfboards are bought and used and almost always built by people whose values are very different from those who build ships for the military. Surfing is a personal pleasure, a healthy life pursuit, a connection to the sea and nature that is, according to aficionados, unparalleled by any other activity. It would be antithetical to the philosophy, almost religion, behind surfing to continue to build and use boards made of toxic materials.

Warships, on the other hand, are built by those who, by definition, see life as less important than power. To participate in the war economy in any way is to agree to the values of power over life, of control over pleasure. Killing—and even death—is preferable to compromise, change, and a reassessment of lifestyle and power structures. So it is no surprise that people whose primary purpose is to build warships are not concerned enough about the health of their workers to find other, non-toxic materials from which to build those ships. All of the members of the Shipyard power structure are, I’m sure, very sorry about the deaths of Claiborne and more than 3000 others just in the Hampton Roads area; but, their actions say, regrettable as it may be, death and suffering are the price we must pay for the lifestyle we choose.

It is, essentially, the same message we send to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority of whom know, it seems, that we are not there to spread democracy and freedom (not for women anyway, who were much better off in both countries before our invasion) but rather to seize and protect the rights of what John Perkins (author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) calls the “corporatocracy”. Make no mistake, the vast majority of people in the US—certainly the vast majority of troops—will receive very little benefit from the corporatocracy whose rights our tax dollars and their lives are given to protect. It is the 1 percent, the superwealthy, the CEOs and major stockholders of Bechtel and Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and all the other reconstruction agents and weapons-makers who benefit. But these members of the corporatocracy—not very different at all from the European monarchies of the 17th through 20th centuries, which consisted almost exclusively of members of the same family—all have each others’ backs. They control the mainstream media, the publishing houses, the textbook publishers, almost every form of information-creation in the USA.

There are, of course, many other ways to get your information. Thanks to the internet, almost everyone in the “First” world has access to alternative information from virtually every perspective. Indeed, I sometimes think too much information is as bad as too little—who can make sense of all the millions of feeds providing contradictory stories? And since US Americans have been indoctrinated nearly from birth to buy, do, believe whatever is most convenient, is it any surprise that that is what most of them do? It is such a struggle in this country to go against the mainstream, to actually do the right thing, that when I can put aside my petty anger and disgust at what I call “ignorant arrogance”, I have to admit that I shouldn’t be surprised at how easily led we are, but rather at how many people are able to reject and find or create alternatives at all.

Long ago I developed an analogy I like to use. As a horse person, I don’t often get to share my love and knowledge of horses with a general audience. But in the years I’ve spent with horses and learning about them, I’ve come to realise something that seems remarkable. Horses are animals of prey; that is, their primary role in the ecosystem, in addition to maintaining the balance of grasslands, is to feed carnivores. Consequently, all of the horse’s survival mechanisms are based on flight. Horses have excellent hearing and sense of smell, good peripheral vision, and are fleet and graceful—all characteristics to allow them to escape from predators. In order for these mechanisms to function best, however, horses need to live in wide-open spaces such as prairies, savannahs, etc. Their natural habitat provides the possibility of using their defenses to the best advantage.

So what do we humans, whose modern civilizations owe much if not most to the companion labor of horses, do with them? We lock them up in small, dark buildings, where the smell of their bodies and excrement fills the air; they cannot see beyond the walls; their own and the noises of other animals interferes with their excellent hearing; and worst of all, when danger is sensed, prevent them from being able to run from it. Once I realised this about horses, I no longer wondered that some were mean, uncooperative, violent, nervous, or developed self-abusing habits; I wondered why all of them didn’t.

And yet, many, many horses have existed throughout human history that have not only overcome these enormous handicaps, forced on them by human domesticity, but have shown almost supernatural strength and valor. Horses, called upon by trusted humans, run until they drop for some personal emergency or military objective. Horses have fought off human or animal attacks on their offspring or their people. Horses, such as Barbaro, who through breeding and training come to love the competition humans subject them to, will race—and try to win—even with a broken leg.

If horses can overcome negative conditioning and handicaps to behave in such a heroic manner, shouldn’t humans also be able to? Other societies—Western as well as non-western—have chosen to base their laws and structure not on power and control, but on compassion and that elusive “pursuit of happiness” that the US enshrined in our founding documents but still seems to elude us. Why can we not, despite our conditioning, reject a system that values power over life, military prowess over personal health? These toxic materials are almost universally banned throughout the rest of the Western world—why can we not ban toxic materials from every aspect of commerce and production? Why must people in this country be forced to choose between well-paid but potentially lethal work and that which is poorly paid but “safe”?
A local paper did a feature on Uncle Claiborne that mistakenly said he died from cancer. He did NOT die from cancer. He died from mesothelioma, a completely preventable, controllable disease. What kind of values can we possibly claim when we continue to allow such a plague?