Its OK Because They're Poor

A simple yet common tale.  An intro comment from Eric Alterman

Read this story about a New York City school built on contaminated land--the environmental assessment done for the city that had showed levels of mercury, chromium, lead, arsenic and other toxic substances much higher than state standards allow--and surrounded by truck fumes for poor minority children- and tell me again that this is the land of equal opportunity.

The essential fact of life in this country is that money is power and access, and if you don't have those, well, you're just going to live with the waste of those who do.

Journey around NYC and you will see what the disadvantaged have to live with and what a wonderful place New York is to be wealthy.  The lucky few stroll the beautiful stretches of madison avenue generating the waste of their charmed lives.  Taking a little too much from the commons.  Then taking a dump in East New York or Brownsville.

If we are a product of our environment, what will be the product of neighborhoods buried in refuse, along contaminated waterways and soot filled air?  If the powers that be treat someone's home as a dump, why should they treat it any different?

The city's Department of Education opened the school, the Soundview Educational Campus, in 2004 on part of a site that had been used for decades by a defense contractor, Loral Electronics, despite an environmental assessment done for the city that had showed levels of mercury, chromium, lead, arsenic and other toxic substances much higher than state standards allow.

We build weapons in their backyard.  Send them to fight our wars.  Then when they return they get to send their kids to school on toxic waste.

This is a bigger issue and deserves better treatment, which I'm sure it gets.  I just get angry when I read things like this, or travel around New York and see the conditions that we force people to live in.  Its much harder to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when the people above you are pouring shit on your head.