WHO IS AFRAID OF RACHEL CARSON

Who's Afraid of Rachel Carson?
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and Countless Others …By Carl Pope, HuffingtonPost.com …Posted on May 29, 2007, Printed on May 31, 2007 …http://www.alternet.org/story/52534/
For the centennial of Silent Spring author Carson's birth on May 27, members of Congress from her home states of Maryland and Pennsylvania introduced a resolution honoring her birth and another to name a post office in Pennsylvania after her. Coburn promptly put a "hold" on the bills to block them from being enacted. Why?

Who & Why are “we” afraid of Rachel Carson…?

SILENT SPRING was first published in the Spring of 1962, some 45 years ago and remains one of the seminal documents referencing man’s interaction with his environment.

In subsequent years, “we” – that’s you and me – in reaction to the formal “corporate” education we received remaining secure in our “ostrich” position continue to permit our current President and his entourage at the EPA, FDA and USDA unrestricted development and use of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fertilizers and growth hormones.

Like Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi - Rachel Carson - stood alone against the vicious vilification which besieged her from powerful “corporate” and political interests. She dared to use “science” in its true form to establish an indelible link between man’s interface with his environment and the potentially catastrophic results when man chooses to play God.

Even today, powerful “corporate” and political interests thwart and actively distort the words as well as the intent of Silent Spring often portraying it as “junk” science. Though “we” choose to believe the purchased university and think tank “science” produced by Exxon-Mobil and its spin on global warming…? “We” choose to allow huge conglomerate “corporate” interests who feel threatened by a single upstart meat processor to run to your federal government for protection…? Protection because this single upstart meat processor wants to perform routine testing on all cattle they purchase to determine if they might be infected with “man-cow-disease”…? If as pontificated by most American economists this is a “free-market-society” why in the world would huge “corporate” meat processors be the least bit concerned about whether some pip-squeak upstart wants to sell his product for a higher price…? Or is the real concern, this pip-squeak upstart is about to blow the lid off closely guarded ugly secrets…?

“It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong” … Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire. Anyone who has dared to speak out against or query any government action which they determined is either personally detrimental or detrimental to the whole of mankind has been subjected in one degree or another to minimal degrees of harassment and vilification as have been Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi and Rachel Carson.

A contemporary victim of this pathetic form of vilification is Cindy Sheehan, who stood solely at the helm choosing to exercise her right to “free-speech” all the while being subjected to personal humiliation and insults from all sides. Few daring to honestly challenge her position choosing instead to attack her personally and emotionally. While she stood at the helm most of us, chose to silently look the other way and remain in our “ostrich” position with our heads firmly buried in the sand.

Not a day passes wherein some revelation is not made public noting what appears to be the manifestation of a new disease, new form of cancer, new form of diminished child development capacity, new form of Alzheimer’s or the discovery of some new transient form of pollution in our water supply, or being discharged from municipal wastewater treatment facilities. “We” clinging to the credence we have been trained to give to “corporate” controlled 30 second sound bites, choose never to consider all these conditions are interrelated, intermingled and inexorable linked.

Folks like Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Cindy Sheehan and Rachel Carson provided to us the positive image of who – “we” – that’s you and me – can be. It takes courage. The courage to get our heads out of the sand and stand up and take a good hard look around us and then act as directed by that inner “whisper” voice we all possess, but seldom choose to listen to.