Who Is At Fault

Article #1: “Who Is At Fault?”

Freedom Includes Our Right to a Pure Environment

Living creatures have a right to a clean environment, and everyone who pollutes it is violating this sacred right. It’s time to insist on quality, worldwide. We will all benefit if we “clean up our act.” We will all suffer if we don’t.

In scanning our environmental problems quickly, the common thread noticed is that it is impossible to “blame” illness on any one particular factor or hazard, because some side effects take years to manifest and because all bodily conditions represent the sum total of the individual’s diet and lifestyle habits. In other words, it’s as if a young child who’s blindfolded in the game hide-and-seek suddenly gets a swift kick in the behind from one of his playmates, but he doesn’t know which one. He has only a sore bottom to show for the experience. This is the ultimate legal loophole, and a rather convenient situation for all the thousands of manufacturers of chemical products and other toxic substances, because finger-pointing years down the line is virtually impossible. It’s a shame that what this boils down to is that some people are only honest if they “have” to be, for example if they’ll be “caught,” otherwise there’s no guarantee. Whenever you meet a person you can really trust, treasure this person, for honor is a precious human quality, and people who don’t have a price are special in our money-oriented times.

We all want security, safety, guarantees, and assurances nowadays, but the fact is that real security involves more than money, the roof over our heads, and so on—real security is ours when we are healthy, hen we have access to the truth and to freedom, when we have lends and people we can trust around us, when we have hope … there are no price tags or monetary values to be put on real security, when you get right down to it. Security also means a clean environment, which brings us back to our question of who is responsible. Not only is blame difficult to place, but another thing we’ll soon notice is that when researchers or doctors are at a loss to explain a problem or “cure” an illness, they often seek, at least, to fix the blame somewhere (or elsewhere). Patients expect answers from doctors, and the public demands results from researchers. Remember when you were in school and you didn’t know the answer to one of those essay questions, but you managed to fill 20 lines of paper anyway with something less than the pertinent details and with much imagination? No one wants to come up empty-handed— if they don’t know, they’ll make something up on short notice. With all the misinformation given us, blame is even harder still to come by.

Because any bodily condition is caused by factors too numerous for our doctors or “experts” to know or mention, we never get the whole story from them anyway. We’re always left with the task of synthesizing the information one way or the other.

All this vagueness also raises some serious questions about our personal freedom to have a pure environment. It’s obvious that “blaming” and “suing” aren’t enough (they don’t always change the situation), and we can’t even know who to blame or sue most of the time. We can’t bring every unseen housewife to court for spraying with an ozone-depleting aerosol can, we can’t sue the sun for ultraviolet skin cancer rays, nor can we sue all the motorists for increasing our CO2 levels. We can’t afford the time it takes Jo blame all the people responsible for the state of our world today, and even if we could spare several lifetimes to make a list of guilty persons, it wouldn’t remedy our ailing earth. So, what exactly are we free to do? We’re free to do what we can.