Planet Waves: Growing Up

It must be terrifying finding out you live in a dormitory contaminated with dioxin. Imagine: You’re 18 years old and you’re having a great time at college. Then one day at the end of the year, you find out that your building had an electrical fire so long ago that nobody remembers, but not so long ago that the toxins are any better than the day of the event. Nobody told you. You feel betrayed. You learn that the chemicals involved will affect you for life; that your children and even your grandchildren may be affected; that you were lied to; and that there is nothing you can do about it except prevent future exposures, if you can.

We always talk about life on a college campus being a microcosm of the “real” world, and SUNY New Paltz, with its inconvenient toxic truth—four contaminated residence halls—surely qualifies. When I get back to town, sometimes after many months away, I inevitably get involved in this issue again, 16 years after the toxic fires that spread contamination through Bliss, Capen, Gage, and Scudder Halls, Parker Theater, and the Coykendall Sciences Building. Writing about this issue has not made me John Grisham. More accurately, I sometimes feel like the Grim Reaper himself paying a friendly little visit, reminding people of the inevitable.

This has always been a tense relationship for me. Most of you know me as an astrologer who helps light up the inner human world of growth and the personal choices we face. In this role, I can be a bit circumspect and less conclusive. When I slip into my role as a dioxin journalist and community organizer, I need to shift into higher-contrast language and ideology; I must apply my talent for confrontation; and bring up a subject that most people would rather forget about. Yet that Grim Reaper thing has another side, which is, by raising these issues, we push people to confront their personal issues and to grow.

As I continue with this work, not entirely voluntarily, it becomes ever easier to see why so much goes unaddressed in the world. Initiating the discussion takes so much energy, and the messenger is often blamed for the message.

Very few people who become a community anti-toxins activist have any formal training, expertise, or authority. Generally, they start with no knowledge and no preparation.

It’s more often people like housewives (Lois Gibbs of the Love Canal comes to mind) or, in the case of Erin Brockovich, a secretary.

My life is often thrust into chaos as a result of getting re-involved. My business typically suffers, my energy runs low, and, along the way, I have to face my own fears and inner demons. I have to be honest with myself about what it means to be alive at this time in history, particularly in the human environment, which rarely seems willing to stand for too much reality. I have to be willing to have many conversations that people would rather not have, when there are plenty of things I would rather be doing.