…a Zombie nightmare rides again.
Photo: Jonathan Lee. Me, Bob Del Tredici, Steve Wing and my hubby casing the FedEx Global Education Center lecture hall at UNC-CH, where all buildings and all departments are now owned by Big Business and Corporate sponsors, much to the dismay of the research faculty.
There are a great many important issues on our plates these days. Health Care (or merely insurance) Reform, two wars of invasion and occupation that show no signs of ending any time soon, an overstretched and vastly underappreciated military, a serious economic collapse and ever-lengthening Great Recession, home foreclosures, unemployment, torture as government policy, war crimes of the last administration stubbornly ignored, and the never-ending assault on the Constitution our erstwhile leaders swore to protect and defend. We who like to think of ourselves as Progressives and are keeping up with issues and actions via the ‘net and blogosphere do what we can on all of the issues, even if not all of them are The Most Important Issue we are personally engaging in our real life spheres. I am adding one more, which probably won’t be at the top of the list for most, but which has been around long enough that it does deserve a place in the lineup of things progressives should keep track of.
This week my husband and I were invited to attend and participate in a lunchtime seminar and evening lecture presentation by Robert Del Tredici of Vanier College in Quebec, Canada. “Looking Into the Nuclear Age: On Life, Art and the Bomb” was stunning. We’d been invited by epidemiologist (and friend) Steve Wing of UNC Chapel Hill, who hosted the event along with artist Elin O’Hara Slavick. Steve had conducted an independent epidemiological study of cancers in the area of Three Mile Island back in the early 1990s, and came to conclusions that directly contradicted those of previous studies and the U.S. government, which has insisted to this very day that no one was harmed by the meltdown.
Steve’s study was to have been evidence in a class action lawsuit in the 1990s with more than 2,000 plaintiffs who had developed cancer after the accident at TMI in 1979. My husband and I were to have been the backup evidence to support his study in that lawsuit, having been the designated “reporting agents” under provisions of 10CFR.21 for the health physics contractor at Three Mile Island immediately following the accident. Neither we nor Steve ever made it to court, as the lawsuit was finally dismissed for “lack of evidence” when the defendants convinced Judge Rambo that the only evidence admissible must be the coverup the guilty parties themselves provided. Duh.