Commentary: Suppose when you’re eight days old Pa is up early, milking, and spots an incredibly bright explosion several dozen miles away. He’s startled and amazed. Never seen anything like it. Later, the radio reports that the Government says ammunition blew up in some accident.
The Government has good reasons – named Tojo and Adolph, and Joe Stalin) – to lie. Eventually you learn, with a mixture of awe and pride, that the explosion was the first Atomic Bomb going off in your desert. That’s after we drop one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. Your uncles get to come home, instead of invading Japan.
No one stresses that the half-life of Plutonium is 24,000 years. Government officials know the radioactive fallout lands all around where you live. They don’t say much. Out where you live, you drink milk and beef from cows that radiation fell on. Your chickens eat grass radiation fell on, and you eat them and their eggs, and the lettuce, beans, and tomatoes Ma plants in the dirt it fell on; and you wash meals down with water from cisterns and acequias it fell on. Sitting at the picnic table it fell on. Saying your prayers at night on the dirt floor it blew onto through the window.
Pa dies of cancer. Ma’s cancer attacks so much of her body the doctors can’t say where it started. Your older sister has her womanly parts taken out when she’s 28. You and half your siblings have thyroid problems. Your high school friends’ families are the same. When you go away to college, you realize other families don’t have near so much cancer and thyroid disease.
Before the test, the Government had no idea what the blast would do. One scientist thought it might blow up the world. Government workers prepared press releases apologizing for the death toll, in case there was one, even in your “lightly populated” county.
The USSR gets the bomb, too. The U.S. continues testing powerful, poisonous bombs, though now with more knowledge. In 1990, the Government starts a program to compensate folks harmed by living near the Nevada Test Site.
They don’t compensate New Mexicans. Do they think folks need a passport to visit New Mexico? Do they figure Indians and Mexicans don’t matter? But you’re a patriotic American, you tear up when they play the anthem, on the Day of the Dead you honor your brother who didn’t come back from ‘Nam. Are government officials so angry at the Japanese saying the Bomb shouldn’t have been dropped that they can’t face up to the harm the bomb did on U.S. soil?
Currently there’s another attempt to amend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act to help the folks hurt by the first Atomic Bomb. U.S. Senator Ben Ray Lujan and others seek to add New Mexico downwinders and uranium miners to those RECA could help with their medical problems. New Mexican leaders speak up for it. Your Congresswoman doesn’t, at first, but you feel sure she will. These are her people. And maybe whoever decides these things will listen this time. Particularly if enough folks everywhere speak up, and tell their senators and representatives they support amending RECA.
Because it ain’t about what the Japanese did or didn’t deserve, after Pearl Harbor. It’s about patriotic U.S. citizens unwittingly drafted into extensive suffering to help us win the war. They deserve medical help. Call your legislators!