It’s been almost 25 years since I officially moved from the northwest Georgia town of Calhoun while I was in college. Following a controversial incident with the county election board over an absentee ballot that was sent to my college P.O. Box on the day of the election which meant I would have no time to get it returned, I officially changed my residency to my apartment complex so I could vote in the 2000 election more easier. Even though I had to wait in line almost an hour at the county fairgrounds, at least I got to vote. I think the location of the polling place was also suspect as many people in the precinct probably were college-age voters since most apartments were centrally located in one spot of Statesboro, Ga. at the time.
But this isn’t a post about voting as much as it is a post about a warning. Earlier this year, I discovered what I had long suspected in the back of my head growing up all those years ago. The Southern Environmental Law Center is suing the City of Calhoun, Ga. on allegations of violating federal regulations and allowing pollutants in the drinking water. The Center is representing the Coosa River Basin Initiative. Calhoun is home to many carpet, rug and other textile companies, as well as neighboring towns of Dalton (which is the epicenter of carpet manufacturing) and Rome. These industries are known to use polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) or as it’s known “forever chemicals” because it will hardly ever decompose into the ecosystem or worse in our own bodies.
The Center alleges “the unrestricted discharge of PFAS into the wastewater treatment plant, contaminating sewage sludge that the city disposed on agricultural land in the region. Calhoun’s wastewater treatment plant is polluting the region with PFAS in two ways: discharging PFAS directly to the Coosawattee River from a large sludge field upstream of one of the city’s main drinking water intakes, and contaminating groundwater with PFAS from previously dumped sludge. Calhoun’s second drinking water treatment plant draws source water from onsite groundwater wells and a natural freshwater spring near certain sludge application fields, and all sources have reported PFAS based on agency testing in 2021. Although Calhoun leaders say they no longer dispose of sludge on the land, the PFAS contamination remains ongoing.”
The entire press release can be found here: https://www.southernenvironment.org/press-release/groups-sue-to-stop-pfas-pollution-in-northwest-georgia/
For the most part, I have friends still in Calhoun and a few family members. But there’s no telling who and how they’ve been affected if at all. Or it leaves to wonder how long it has been these chemicals have been discharged into the northwest Georgia area. I remember growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the soccer field was located near the wastewater treatment plant. And whenever there was a heavy spring rain, the field would flood with raw sewage. The same was the case at the recreational park in town, located conveniently in one of the industrial park areas. There was the Oothkalooga Creek that ran just along the western edge of the recreation park. And every spring and summer when there was heavy rains, it would flood the park.
I asked my mother, who’s lived in the area almost 80 years, why they would build a soccer field and a recreational park in such flood plain areas. Her answer was simple – it was free and no one else wanted to use it. So, they dumped it on young kids to play in. This might explain why so many people I grew up with have died in their 20s, 30s, 40s including my late girlfriend, Kerry.
She had moved away after graduation in 1997 and lived in Atlanta and the Phoenix area. In 2018, in an attempt to settle into a simpler life, she temporarily moved to Calhoun for less than a year. But a lot of personal problems happened. And she moved to the Orlando area where she lived for the next three years. It was around 2019 when she started to have a lot of serious health problems. I sent the story on to her mother who said they might never know what happened to Kerry as she donated her body to science when she passed in February of 2022. However, her mother said it has always been a concern for them living around all the carpet and rug factories.
My grandmother worked in the factories and she would get bad coughing fits. She also smoked Winston cigarettes for years so that might have something also to do with it. But I was thinking of all the people I went to school with who have died compared to the people my parents went to school with. My father lost one childhood friend in the Vietnam War. He lost another friend to cancer in the mid-1980s. As far as I know, there weren’t many as other people who passed at an younger age.
I can’t count on my hands the number of people I know who have died. Some were killed in car accidents. Others had drug overdoses. But a lot had heart attacks in their 30s or 40s. Or they had serious illnesses, such as cancer or kidney failure. The younger brother of one of our friends had brain cancer and he passed in 2019. Some others have passed away in the past couple of years from cancer and other illness. I even heard one of the kids a few grades below me didn’t even make it to graduation because they were exposed to the sewage at the soccer fields.
This stretches past the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains where I grew up. A Reuters news story posted in late December 2023 indicates that PFAS is also used in firefighting foam sprayed at airports and firehouses across the country. And it gets into the water supply this way. Reuters reported that 3M has indicated they are going to make PFAS more safely and discontinue it in 2025. “Chemours, DuPont and Corteva declined to comment on the litigation,” Reuters reporter Clark Mindock wrote in his story.
You can read the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/forever-chemicals-were-everywhere-2023-expect-more-litigation-2024-2023-12-28/
Of course, it takes litigation to get anything done. And it’s always if the litigation is going to be very pricey, that companies step up and finally stop fucking up the environment, pardon my language. But why the fuck can’t 3M do it this year?! It’s probably not cost-efficient to do it immediately. And I’m sure it won’t stop at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2025 either. The company still has a good 20 months to continue churning out the dangerous chemicals before the year 2026 rolls around.
Speaking of DuPont, if you can find Dark Waters, with Mark Ruffalo as real-life attorney Rob Bilott, who found himself representing people who had died or suffered cancer from a PFAS that contaminated the waters in the Ohio Valley Area. A lot wasn’t done at first because it affected the rural people, such as farmers and ranchers. Apparently the movie ends with the title card indicating that about 90 percent of the world’s population is infected with the chemicals used to make Teflon. Add to that the effects of antibiotics in meat and foods as well as the increase of high fructose corn syrup in just about everything since the 1970s, we don’t know how badly we’re affected.
Our bodies are just walking chem labs. Any time a person is exposed to something, it can affected them differently. I didn’t know many people had peanut allergies until I went off to college. When I was growing up, there were only a handful of people who had to be careful on what they ate. I remember even the cafeteria recognized religious practices by giving people fish option on Fridays so they wouldn’t have to eat meat.
Yet, I noticed something strange as I went into the professional world of journalism. A lot of young people were bigger in their sizes. It’s no secret that schools decided to sell space to the concession workers who would place venting machines in major common areas so they could get supplemental funds. I mean, we had them when I was in school. But usually the drink machines were located in one room in one wing and was only accessible after school let out.
Not to sound perverted, but I realized the young girls in the 2000s were getting more developed. I had to interview a valedictorian at one of the high school and she walked in with her purse strap between her breasts that were quite big for an 18-year-old. Those were people born in the mid-1980s. And a few years later when I was covering students born in the early 1990s, the girls were for lack of a better word, thic. Seriously, just 10 years earlier, the girls I graduated with wouldn’t dare go to school with bigger thighs and a rounder mid section.
I’ve joked when I started taking pictures of public events in 2001, women were demanding I don’t take pictures from behind. Yet, by the end of the decade, everyone was showing off their cake. And I’m sure the antibiotics in meat products has something to do with it. Chickens are also fed more corn so they will get fatter before they are slaughtered. So, therefore, if you’ve eaten meat in the past 50 years that was mass-processed, you’ve ingested these antibiotics.
My neighbors raise cattle they send off to Bovine University. They started doing this in 2021 and gave me about two pounds of ground beef and when I cooked it, it smelt and tasted different. It wasn’t bad. No, it was very good, but it wasn’t the stuff you bought in the stores. They mostly let their cattle graze but I’m sure they give them feed as well. But it tasted more leaner and less greasy than other places I’ve purchased beef.
(A side note and I’m only mentioning it because I want you to know. Be careful where you purchased ground beef. I saw a report back in 1998 some bigger supermarkets put pieces of pork and poultry as the ground it. People were getting sick from trichinosis, which is a food-borne illness in pork products. However, many said they didn’t eat pork but they weren’t cooking their ground beef well done before consuming it.)
So, what do we do now to ensure companies make safer chemicals? It’s very likely that the lawsuits filed over the last year can take many years before they are settled. And even then, it can take more time for the companies and municipalities to implement changes. While 3M reports it will make safer PFAS products by 2025, it could be 2035 or longer before other companies even begin to change.
And it could be affected by the elections? Let’s face it, Donald Trump has no desire whatsoever to save the environment. The man turns 78 this year. Do you think he will even be alive by 2035? He’s showing signs of dementia. He’s obese and continues to eat fatty foods. Even drinking Diet Cokes still affects his body. The aspartame in the diet soft drinks are just as hazardous than the HFCS in “regular” soft drinks. People like Trump and other businessman and industrialists just want to make as much money as they can before they pass away.
And Trump is all about the money. Seeing how he and other conservatives have openly criticized Greta Thurnberg and other environmentalists, it’s obvious they don’t care. Covid is still a major health problem. Our bodies are probably infected with it despite the vaccine and booster shots. It’s just something we learn to live with. It’s the same as when we get chicken pox. It stays in our system and sometimes returns in adulthood. My mom got it when she was in her late 50s following an auto-immune disease. She was certain she had it because my brother and I both got the chicken pox in the summer of 1987. It was probably because of her illness. And she got it simply by walking past a room at the dentist office she was working at the time and a young patient was in the early stages of it. The virus was in the air.
Kerry got the shingles the summer of 2021. She was only 42 at the time. I know she had a weakened immune system. My mother has granulomatosis with polyangiitis, otherwise known as Wegener’s disease. The daughter of a woman I went to high school with was recently diagnosed with the same disease as well. She can’t be older than 24. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) has been recently hospitalized as she has May-Thurner Syndrome, a rare vascular condition. Anna Paquin reportedly has some medical issues that she’s keeping private but she is having to use a walking cane.
Both Paquin and Boebert are in their early 40s. It seems odd that so many younger people are getting sicker with life-long illnesses, but maybe it’s because of the world they’ve grown up in isn’t as clean as it was when older generations were around. There’s more chemicals in foods and products as well as floating through the air and in water.
During the early days of Covid, they told people not to rub their eyes with dirty hands as it can get in that way. Remember the scene in 28 Days Later where Brendan Gleeson’s character becomes infected when one drop of blood lands in his eye? Calhoun is located along Interstate 75 with multiple exits and amenities along those exits. All it can take is one person stopping off at a restroom to wash their hands and then rub their eyes. It all depends on your immune system.
Needless to say, this is the same Congressional district currently held by Marjorie Taylor Greene. And while people there say they have notified her office and it’s become more of a non-partisan issue, it is still an election year. Greene and others may make big noise about PFAS this year. But you probably won’t hear squat a week after the elections, the same way you don’t hear about border security except when it’s an election year.
And now people are saying they’re not wanting to vote for President Joe Biden for his stance on the War in Gaza. I’ll admit, he’s not doing all he can. But does anyone think Trump would be any fucking better? Michael Rappaport, who has spent years blasting Trump, came out lately and said he might actually considering voting for Trump over the War in Gaza. It wasn’t an April Fools Day joke.
Democrats in Michigan and New York didn’t vote for Biden in the primaries. This isn’t the year to have a protest vote. You all tried that back in 2016 and we all know what happened then. Do you need any evidence of what the Trump Presidency will be like? I got news for you. Just remember what it was like four-fucking-years ago!
You want to hold Biden and his administration’s feet to the fire more? Fine. But consider the alternative and realize that people are dying in this country too. And it will only get worse if we let a charlatan who has been indicted 91 times in separate criminal cases back in the White House. I’ve come to realize that a lot of Democrats are struggling with the notion that Kamala Harris may actually be the next President and that’s what angers them. In 2000, Al Gore ran as President with Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Lieberman passed away on March 27, 2024 at the age of 82. If Gore had chose any other running mate who WASN’T Jewish, he would’ve won in 2000, I’m certain.
People need to put their racial, sexists and misogynistic biases behind them and realize how much more damaging it can be. Trump has already told us what type of President he will be. We already got an appetizer of that. It’s going to be a lot worse. And like all Republican Presidents, their goal is to undo everything Democrat Presidents do especially if it benefits “the little people.” That’s it. Trump is in bed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who that country had gotten rid of once before. So, if you want to see what things look like when you rehire an employee you had to fire, go on and vote for Trump. Or use your “protest” to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You think things will be better in Trump’s dealing with Netanyahu or Russian President Vladimir Putin, then, I have some mountain property in south Florida to sell you.
I’ve already spent the first half of my 40s mourning the loss of one of the people I’ve loved the most. And I’ve also had to watch the other one’s health get worse and worse while I couldn’t do much because my health was bad. I don’t want to spend the rest of this time watching others die knowing good and well we could have done more to prevent it. It’s very likely Biden wouldn’t even be running if the Republicans had done their damned jobs and kept Trump from seeking another term following the impeachment.
I don’t know about any of you, but I’m getting sick and tired of all these fuck-ups by people who put profit and their own religious bias ahead of concern for other people. I want to keep all the science-fiction movies about dystopias just that – science fiction. I don’t want to live in a world where the living envy the dead.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 