blog action day 2008
Grass roots: one of my favorite of all idioms.
Today, Blog Action Day 2008. Topic this year: Poverty.
When I heard the topic a month or two ago, I thought, how easy. I’ll just talk about my two current favorite charitable organizations. Both address poverty, and more, both address individual faces and needs. And human dignity.
The first one, Kiva.org, as it turns out, has been adopted as an officially-suggested response to Blog Action Day by the BAD team. So not so much publicity needed there, perhaps. Microlending. Give it a whirl.
The second one I can wholeheartedly endorse as I’ve seen them in action. Poco a Poquito was founded by a remarkable woman, Aida Barbosa, who grew up on the Mexico/Texas border and for over 40 years has been collecting donations and volunteers to provide basic needs to people in border towns. My church got involved, and even the city of San Marcos has provided a venue for a yearly benefit concert. I believe this is principally through the effort of Joel Schwartz, a gifted musician and member of First Lutheran.
To hear either Joel or Aida Barbosa speak about their work is to hear undiluted passion: a gift to us, the cynical, the emotionally fatigued [okay, that's me I'm describing]. Ten times a year or more, Poco a Poquito takes a load of donated clothing and food and other necessities to communities of people living virtually in dumps, scavenging through garbage to keep body and soul together.
I wanted to link to their website here, but I am thwarted by lack of any such thing. There’s one in the works. In the meantime, donations can be sent to:
POCO-A-POQUITO INC
187 Encino Loma
Killeen Tx 76542
Writing even these few paragraphs has me thinking about the quality of my (self-absorbed, privileged) lifestyle. I have lame arms, I can’t eat normal food, I’m terminally shy: I’m not built for rescue missions and hard physical labor at this point. I know I could overcome those limits with some work. But before I even get to that, there are so many things I am truly good at that can help just as much, somewhere. I can write. I can sing. I can sew and craft. I am financially sound even in this day and I can loan and give money. And enjoy it all.
I’m looking out for ways to make these personal amusements count against poverty. A little Blog Action is a dangerous thing.
blog action day
I don’t follow many blogs, but one that has grabbed my attention recently mentions that today is Blog Action Day.
I didn’t know. And I didn’t do anything for the environment today at all. T. remembered to take out the recycling bin, <surprise>, so I didn’t even have to do that.
I guess I’ll have to fall back on asbestos. Ouch, pointy stuff. Environmental health surely qualifies.
I know, I know. You thought asbestos was banned back in the 70s or 80s, right? It was, pretty much, in 1989, with the EPA’s “Asbestos Ban and Phase-out Rule.” And then guess what, the ban was overturned by the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991. And since then…nothing. Big government, you know. Poking their damn noses in where they didn’t belong, and threatening, of all things, profits.
You know who was behind the appeal? Halliburton, among others. I tend to think that’s sufficient proof of evil. Subsidiaries of Halliburton, among others, have routinely filed for bankruptcy since then rather than pay out on asbestos claims. A complete SNAFU…everything bad and good you ever hear about lawyers is illuminated by the history of asbestos litigation.
Unscrupulous lawyers have signed up legions of people not even sick yet or ever to file claims, tying up the courts very handily. Actually sick people die before they see compensation. Actual corporate records reveal conversations about the best strategies to deal with investigations: delay, stonewall, obfuscate, cooperate (never favored), wait for death.
Death. Mesothelioma, the marker cancer associated with asbestos exposure, is apparently an agonizing death. But hey, it’s quick. Most people diagnosed with mesothelioma don’t live two years.
Asbestos was found in crayons, crayons, in the year 2000. Were you paying attention then? I wasn’t. We stopped using it in spray-on insulation somewhere back in the 1970s and we thought everything was fine. Only, oops, it’s in the vermiculite you pot your plants with. It’s in the crayons your kids are coloring their teeth with. It’s in talc—the very makeup you’re putting on your face.
You get talc from mines. Miners at the turn of the century, this century, received killing doses of asbestos.
Didn’t you just assume somebody was taking care of it all? I did.
They’re not. There are no rules that really make sense. Even the current government-mandated exposure limit, which sounds good at less than 0.1 fibers per cubic centimeter of air, allows over a million fibers per day for a full-time worker—of a substance that has no known safe exposure level. One fiber could be the one that lodges in your pleura. The limit is chosen for economic feasibility, not for human safety.
Caveat: Yeah, you have to do that in general. Cost/risk analysis makes sense. Otherwise you end up with a system like American health care, where maximum expenses are tolerated for greatest return on the tiniest of probabilities.
But why is it that in many countries where they allow greater risk (in health care) for lesser cost, they have also banned asbestos outright? Because they’re socialists? Because they don’t care about the individual, only the statistic?
Because they’re sane? Because they realize that prevention always trumps reparation?
Why can’t we realize that?
