#cw us government

[entity9silvergen]

I don’t think anyone else cares about this but I’m reeling. Big Dropout fan, of course, but also watched Robert Reich’s documentary several times between high school and college. I’ve had the passing thought they look sort of similar and have the same last name but never would’ve made the connection if not for google making the search suggestion

[soundwavefucker69]

It’s actually really painful to have your teeth whitened. It hurts a lot, and they look like chalk until they heal. Sometimes, whitening doesn’t even lift all of the stains, and fake enamel has to be put over teeth, and it doesn’t always match.

My two front teeth are a different color from the rest of them. My family never really had soda in the house as a kid. My mother used to leave out mint tea, which she’d steep in the sun, lightly sweetened, served chilled. It was my favorite drink. She’d leave it on the back patio, and I have never been able to make that same tea or recreate the taste of my childhood. We had a next door neighbor at that house who had wild mint growing in her garden she let us harvest, because she viewed it as a weed, but we sure loved that mint tea. She had a miniature pony, I think his name was Philip, that ran around in the backyard, and I loved that horse. He was so unique as opposed to the big dogs and little chihuahuas all over our town. Another neighbor down the way, Miss Rosie, that lived in a house hidden from the road just after the asphalt turned to dirt, let me and my brother and our foreign exchange sister, Fah, pick pomegranates from her overgrown tree.

Miss Rosie died of cancer just a little after we moved out of that house.

Nowadays, my dad tells my younger siblings to stop leaving water bottles half finished all over the house, and threatens them with teeth like mine if they keep wasting water, because he’ll stop buying water bottles if they won’t use them.

Of course, the memory of thousand dollar dental bills right before senior pictures stays his hand, and he’ll never get rid of the water bottles.

I grew up in a small Arizona town called Globe. It’s a few miles away from the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and if I bring up my fucked up teeth to anyone from town, they’ll laugh and say one of two things.

“That’s mining water for ya.”

“Man, that Agent Orange knows how to stick around.”

In 1969, the US Forest Service sprayed multiple Arizona families with Silvex, also known as Agent Orange, on repeated occasions, as part of a test of the new chemical agent. Civilians were specifically targeted by the toxic fumes. Within days, they started experiencing symptoms. Loss of mobility, up to 36 seizures a day, lifelong problems that soon developed into cancer. They sued, and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. It was only years later that stories started surfacing again of Hodgkin’s Disease and cancer, with reports detailing in the hundreds.

About a decade before, a less harsh concoction similar to that same chemical was sprayed over San Carlos Reservation, one of the poorest Native American reservations in the country, in an effort to wipe out the vegetation along the Gila River to provide more water to the Phoenix metropolitan area. Effects did not start within days, as was the case when it was sprayed on the residents of Globe, Arizona and bombed the water for years to come. For over a decade, the area along Gila River was doused in this herbicide, killing the ecosystem and poisoning the residents of the reservation in an effort to sustain the growth of the Phoenix metropolitan area. In 1969, once again, following the disaster of the bombing of Globe, the flights came to an end.

Growing up in Globe in the late 90′s and early 2000′s was strange. I knew about the Agent Orange. We joked about, laughed about, even as our elders continued to die from cancer, and the reservation struggled under a destroyed ecological system and the resulting food system. My fucked up teeth were commonly blamed on the mining and the Agent Orange in equal measure, because we didn’t truly know how long it could possibly be until the water was safe, but you couldn’t tell a kid in the early 2000′s to not drink from the hose.

The US government did not discontinue the use of Agent Orange until the late 70′s, and it was only decided to discontinue the use after birth defects continued to emerge in lab animals.

I need to stress this.

Animals.

A decade after they had melted real human being’s hair off.

It’s still not fully known why the tribal government agreed to the use of herbicides on the soil, and I still have not found evidence of them uncovering what was in the chemical concoction that was sprayed, and only a small fraction of the residents of Globe have received reparations. The San Carlos residents have received none.

I used to get called a conspiracy theorist for bringing this up. People didn’t believe this happened. The US government engaging chemical warfare on its own citizens, not for civil disobedience, or unionizing, or telling corporations no, but just because we were poor, and we were there, and they could, is not something people want to address. But it happened, and you should know about it.