#guess i haven't quite escaped my asbestos era sorry

[girderednerve]

hey guys guess what! that's right, i went to my terrible class today, so that means that i am going to write a long annoying post about...... asbestos

my professor was trying to talk about how people receive unreliable health information from television but because i live in fl*rida instead of just saying "fox news peddles dangerous and alarmist lies about vaccines" she decided to say that she watches a lot of hallmark movies so she sees a lot of commercials about mesothelioma, and made a joke about how sometimes she gets a tickle in her chest after she sees them. i too have an anxious disposition but i found this obnoxious, and doubly so after she was like, laughing about asbestos exposure

here's the thing: the observed connection between asbestos exposure and mesothelioma was demonstrated in a formal medical context in 1964 or so, with a paper that surveyed people in a south african asbestos mining township. mesothelioma is an incredibly painful disease; it is aggressive; most people diagnosed with it die within eighteen months, and people have gotten it after being exposed to loose asbestos fibers for mere hours. asbestos is an incredibly dangerous substance, and we knew that before 1964, but we surely knew it after; and here's what happened after that study hit the international scene: not terribly much, and certainly not terribly quickly. south africa continued to export asbestos, and miners continued to die. so did installation workers, and for that matter so did brake techs and factory workers and construction workers and transportation workers and people who lived in older and lower quality housing.

now it's illegal to use asbestos in most applications; the quebec mines have finally gone quiet, as far as i know. it's still mined in russia. they mix it into cement. remediation workers in the west are often people with arrest records. it's dangerous work.

and, as i've said here before & will say again, & again, & again—like every other disease of environmental & occupational exposure, mesothelioma is class war. no one dies of asbestos exposure by mistake. someone decided to open a mine, to employ people, to dig it up, to manufacture it, to install it, knowing now for sixty years that it kills people. and the people who die of it are, overwhelmingly, marginalized, poor, racialized.

obviously i was deeply bothered by my professor's like, offhand comment, i know she didn't mean it any kind of way. but that's the part that gets me: that we have decades, centuries sometimes, of vicious, deliberate choices that underlie these jokes. it feels like an awful concession to the murderers of the past to let that history subside in favor of the offhanded comment.

and that's what i thought about in class today. well. among other things. i don't know how anyone thinks of anything else, some days