let me share a memory with yโall. itโs from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. itโs high summer. i donโt remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it โ wait, you donโt have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i donโt remember passing out, but iโm told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if iโd died, the cause of death probably wouldโve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know iโm probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish theyโd put themselves in my momโs shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, thatโs poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i canโt even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didnโt end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didnโt boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
i still wouldnโt want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldnโt bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich wonโt even feel the extra money, theyโve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind whoโd been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was justโฆ the way things were.
iโm sorry. i didnโt mean to longpost. itโs just. god. yโall have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until itโs too late.
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