“…had come of age during the civil rights campaigns, the Viet Nam war,
the draft resistance movement—all clearly defined issues in which right, as he
saw it, eventually triumphed. His legal experience had reinforced his belief
that even when the system is inadequate, the individual can eventually seek
redress. Now he was troubled to find that this was not always so: that when
government and industry are threatened, these two may close ranks, and, in self
protection, militate against the good of the public they are supposed to serve.
What happened in Michigan, he believed, involved subtle shifts in the power
structure so that bureaucrats ended up protecting corporate giants, not for
monetary gain (that might have been easy to prove) but to preserve their own authority
and status. Pitted against this was a little band of farmers who had been
abused by industry, and failed by their elected officials. Gary welcomed the chance to represent one of
them in court. There he believed justice would prevail.
The Poisoning of
Michigan by Joyce Egginton page 289
This is the book I’ve been working on. Managed to find a
cheap, really cheap library discard. Stumbled across the story just by chance
in a TV movie that was made back the eighties. I thought the movie was brutal.
More about the book later. But take my last entry. If we could see at the
blazing starlight level whether something was sick or well, there’d be no
question. No way to hide. No polite fictions.
And justice did not prevail. In light of the current tight
symbiosis between big ag, big chemical represented by the likes of Dow and
Monsanto and the politicians that are supposed to represent us, I think I need
to find my copy of the Monkey Wrench Gang.
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