I was watching CNN this afternoon. Featured was a young Palestinian-American living in Gaza.
"What’s it like?" the CNN reporter asked him. "Are you scared." She furrowed her brow with concern.
"It’s tough sometimes," the young man said with nary an accent, his skateboard dangling limply at his side, shoulders slack. "Yo, my buddy was almost blown up. It was like, messed up an’ stuff. This rocket, like, it came screaming in and almost hit us. Yo." We, the viewer, are treated to a little montage of our youthful ghetto urban kid from the "street" yo doing lame jumps around Gaza on his skateboard.
Then his mother comes on, Shelly "American Name hyphen Palestinian name." "I worry about him. It is dangerous here. But what are you going to do?"
And I’m thinkin’, GET THE HELL OUT OF GAZA, IDIOT! So here we have an American woman married to a Palestinian man, and the best living arrangement they could come up with was Gaza? WTF?
So okay, I’m thinking, benefit of the doubt time. Maybe they are international aid workers. Maybe he is well-educated and has a call to social work and civil justice. He cares about his people and wants to help them.
But then I thought about Chernobyl.
Yeah, Chernobyl.
Would you raise your kids there?
There’s a toxicity in the ground, in the air, in the water that isn’t going to dissipate for hundreds of years. The best thing you can do is leave. Barring that, you die. This is the same scenario for any one of the US Federal Superfund sites, communities laid to waste by greed, incompetence or ignorance. Guess what happens, folks. People pack it in and head for the hills. The ground’s been spoiled. The land isn’t worth having. It sucks, but we’d rather be alive someplace else then die young from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or have our kids born retarded and/or with missing or extra digits.
So it makes perfect sense to leave. You do not want to raise your kids in a toxic environment because it will make them sick and they will suffer and die.
You do not want to raise your children in an environment of violence, hatred, and poverty because it will make them sick and they will suffer and die. Living in such a place will make you just as sick as if it was pesticides, mercury, or uranium.
Why do we have so little insight into societal toxicity? What happens when a culture, region, or neighborhood is so overwhelmed with hatred, violence, crime, and oppression that it becomes impossible to grow up healthy and unaffected by the mutagenic qualities of the environment? Why do we as stubborn idiot humans feel some sort of social responsibility to the land and/or the community? How come the help we feel we need to render is something other than a ride out of the place?
An environmental worker explains, holding an intricate cylindrical device connected to a number of brightly colored tubes, "You see, resident, we just need to filter the water through this special radiological filter – don’t forget to change it every 3 months *nervous laugh*, and make sure that you don’t go outside without your dust mask. And don’t touch the dirt. Oh, yeah, you can’t hunt either. All animal life is carrying alpha emitters. Oh, yeah, make sure you sleep face down with a sheet over your head and put tape over all points in your home where there is air infiltration: door jam, windows, etc."
"Um, miss, we just want to leave. Can we go someplace else?"
"Why would you want to do that. This is YOUR land."
"Yeah, but my, um, urine glows."
"Who’s a mister negative. You just have to make it better. Where’s your sense of responsibility?"
"It left with my hair."
So you see it doesn’t make any sense in Chernobyl, why should it make any more sense in Palestine, the favelas in Brazil, La Perla in Puerto Rico, North St. Louis, or Iraq, or any place else that has been spoiled completely by societal toxicity.
Get out, get far away, let the half life of hate and despair take its toll on the area. Let it return to its placid state. Once the haters have killed each other, you might be able to move back and reclaim the land, but it’s going to be a long time. Don’t expect it in your lifetime. All forms of toxicity take generations to dissipate, hate included.