For a quick short answer I urgently suggest “RIGHT NOW”. What parent wouldn’t immediately rescue their young child from death or life long injury seeing their child in imminent danger?  But suppose there were two children and it was your neighbor’s child drinking the poison, Would you say: “Oh well, it is only little Freddie, and not my concern”?  The answer for both of these questions would be a indignant: “No!”  Yet here we are, watching a whole village of children being poisoned and saying, “you know some day we may have to do something about that.” 

There is a curtain of convenient commerce babble that insulates us from the reality of entire towns being poisoned by the lead recycled from and for vehicle batteries. The lead killing and injuring them is required  for our environmentally conscious electric vehicles. Unfortunately sometimes our ‘necessities’ turn into subsistence income for economically impoverished cities on distant continents. A New York Times report described in Ogijo, a town near Lagos Nigeria, a test sample showed 7 out of 10 people had been lead poisoned and all workers in the sample test carried lead poisoning sometimes 5 times as much as published safe limits.  The same goes for the general population as well as children in Ogijo  where black lead laden dust rains down on the whole town from the factory they depend upon to make a bare living. If Dante were still alive he would have to expand his imagery of hell to a ring of the unfortunate innocent. In this world ,what child isn’t your child?  Global communications and commerce have forced knowledge of critical danger to both children and adults on us that we really don’t want.  Anti globalism is in effect a desperate effort to unknow what can’t be unknown. But if we don’t want to go global look to Arizona where our current administration is exempting copper smelters from air pollution requirements for a couple of years or more while we think about it.. 

A Modest Proposal for Good

This writer seriously doubts Americans, in the majority, want to participate in inflicting pain on the vulnerable people of this planet.  This kind of pain occurs because we are invited  to live in engineered ignorance.  A small, profit hungry minority are all too happy to provide “suffering cancelling” ear pods in the form of misinformation for that part of our brains that communicates empathy and conscience.  We could demand and afford as a collective to require safe source batteries for our vehicles.  Using our influence and wealth we could help Ogijo clean up and sustain their economy. That  would mean increasing the pressure on the President  and Congress to wake up and look around.  That is not being “woke”.   That is being consciously human and humane.  Engineer witnessing and response  instead of ignorance.  Yes our needs are poisoning children and no matter the distance and we should care.  That would be good.