Hightower Lowdown
"You can put earrings on a hog, but it won't hide the ugliness." -- Jim Hightower
In This Issue
The "environmental President" he won't be
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Poisoning kids with pesticides
Children can be pests sometimes, but no one would advocate dousing them with pesticides.
Yet, in communities all across the country, school officials are doing exactly that — not by dousing the tykes directly, but by blithely spraying toxic chemicals in classrooms and all around the schoolyard.
Matthew Metelko and his classmates at Jurupa Hills Elementary in California can tell you about it. To eradicate flies, school administrators installed automatic pesticide dispensers throughout the school. Suddenly, previously healthy children were ill—Matthew got blisters on his skin after coming in contact with classroom surfaces, and he developed a "smoker's cough," diarrhea, stomach pains, and shortness of breath.
His is just one case out of hundreds reported each year of children poisoned by pesticides at school. To stop pesticide use in your school system, call the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides: 541-344-5044.