Week Four

New Pilgrim Chronicles:
One man's story of the trials and rewards of moving to Free State
Week Four: Depleted Uranium and Provisioning Return to the Former State

by Brian Wright (copyright 2005) t color=blue Sir, I can tell you it is catastrophically toxic and has afflicted untold numbers of US servicemen and women, caused birth defects in their babies, not to mention an even greater amount of radiological damage to the populations where the munitions have been used. Of approximately 600,000 soldiers who were part of Gulf War I, 11,000 are now dead and, as of 2000, 325,000 soldiers (>50%) are on permanent disability—the rate for soldiers in other 20th century wars is 5%.

DU kills and maims over a longer period of time than conventional weapons, four to five years are required sometimes to see the symptoms. DU in shells gives rise to intense heat upon impact and disperses untold numbers of microscopic ceramic radioactive balls, that spread in the atmosphere with an aerosol effect. By breathing, contacting with the skin, or merely being in the presence of unexploded DU shell casings, a victim picks up hundreds or thousands of times what is considered lethal radiation in conventional medical practice. (By the way the entire planet is damaged by DU.)

Imagine getting an X-ray at your dentist's every hour for months.

A Veterans Administration study found that in a group of 251 soldiers from Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67% of their post-war babies were born with birth defects.[1] They were born missing legs, arms, organs or eyes, or had immune system and blood diseases. Unfortunately, there is no treatment (at least not until nanotechnology advances).

Mr. Sununu, please check into this problem. Soldiers must be informed and tested, widescale decontamination procedures must be initiated immediately! We must also immediately stop manufacture and use of these weapons of mass destruction. Two bills are before the House, now, HR 202 and HR 2210. It's a start. If Congress does nothing, a cancer epidemic of epic proportions will occur in Southern Iraq—making the problems of American industrial asbestos poisoning seem trivial in comparison. Thousands more American soldiers will suffer and die young, producing many babies with birth defects. I know you deeply care about these men and women. Please be a leader.

I ask that you look at the website of Veterans for Peace, www.veteransforpeace.org, as well Dr. Moret's website below, and do some research of your own. Also, if you have time, please obtain and watch the new DVD film, Poison DUst[2]. Please help us combat this serious disease issue; how we handle it will define our virtue as a country.[3]

Sincerely,
Brian Wright


Sources:

[1] http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Leuren-Moret21apr03.htm
[2] http://www.iacenter.org/poison-dust.htm
[3] For a local contact in the anti-DU, anti-empire movement, please contact Women Making a Difference and Democracy for New Hampshire: http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/1073

I don't come to the Free State to sit on my hands while a massive injustice is being perpetrated. I'm finding the peace movement motivates me, because peace and freedom so naturally hang together. Also, I feel a little bit guilty for being prowar after 9/11… before I looked into the depth of our leadership's depravity. I want to redeem myself.

One of these days, I believe we'll see a permanent peace movement led by libertarians. The antiwar groups will have names like Free State Citizens for Peace and Small Government. The relationship between liberty and peace will become crystal clear.

We'll see if my FS legislators respond. Recently, in the Old State, I sent several missives to Washington and the state capitol, and only a couple of legislators replied. In the old days, 20-30 years ago, virtually every legislator would respond to a citizen's letter. Fat government is unresponsive government I guess.

Okay, midweek I drive back to the Old State (Michigan). By the way, I it would seem fitting to think of New Hampshire as Free State One, on the premise that we're going to be rolling out freedom pretty quickly to the other states after we achieve it here (Michigan will be something like Free State Forty-Two). Though in transit and cleaning things up for my return, I still have several observations pertinent to the general FS pilgrim.

One has to do with surrounding statist state conditions. My route out of the Free State is to head directly south along US 13, then west on the Mass. Pike. I leave early Wednesday a.m. and I'm looking for signs announcing my arrival in Massachusetts, which is only 30 miles south or so. When I witness an extraordinarily high number of dead businesses by the side of the road, I realize this is the Taxachusetts my mother warned me against.

Then stopping for coffee in one of the smaller northern Mass. cities, I notice something else: it occurs to me to name this condition "the droop factor." People in more statist states are discernibly droopier, as if carrying more weight on their shoulders. Remember my observation of people's expressions from the Week 1 column? This observation is similar. We're all under a big load of criminal, toxic government, but people in the Free State stand a little straighter.

The trip to Michigan I do in one day, a long day, 850 miles. On the journey, stream of consciousness naturally develops the significant concept we broached in Week 2's column:

As we proceed to self-government by the people, it will be necessary to have a widespread feeling of almost a quasi-religious consensus on the nonaggression principle. This principle will need to be raised in consciousness to a "sacred" essence of what makes America America, and ultimately what is seen to make humanity humanity.

A good share of my thoughts during the long day turned to this concept and how to move it forward. I came up with a tentative name and a schema for a future-history novelette; it fits with what we're all about in the FSP.

I'm thinking prophecy as history or vice versa, meaning the novelette takes a vantage point in the future from which it documents our emergence into a post-aggression solar-system political-economy. In that setting (~30 years hence?) disease, old-age, and scarcity are conquered; we control our own biology to the extent we can more or less manipulate our physical beings into the forms we desire; life becomes a constant flow of creative energy as we move toward the stars.

Or not… it's all about choices.

My point is I'm trying to have some big thoughts of how to supercharge the reason-liberty movement. I find it helps me to imagine these peaks of optimism as an antidote to the depressing Orwellian "droopiness" that threatens to smother us all today. One thing is certain: at the root of any future benevolent universe has to be this widespread sanctification of the nonaggression principle. The sine qua non as it were.

Funny how long-distance driving tends to shoot the 'ol noggin into freewheel mode.

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My last FS-related observation for this week has to do with the pace of life in the Free State vs. other more populated areas. I don't think the lower pace, where people move quickly enough but are seldom in a hurry, is exclusive to New Hampshire. I recall being in Montana and feeling the same thing. You really notice the relaxed pace when you go back to alleged civilization and you don't have it anymore.

As I'm driving toward Michigan, and the next few days, too many people are "on my ass." Hurrying. Like them being two inches off my rear bumper is going to get them miles closer to where they're going. So maybe they can get out to their crummy job or home to their dysfunctional family a nanosecond quicker. Sorry to be negative. But it's extremely annoying. And this is one thing you FS comers will be ecstatic to put in your rearview mirror.

Again, I think a lot of the reasonable FS pace centers around having fewer people. Population density is something I want to discuss next week, along with population composition. Some people in the opposition might claim, "Sure, it's gonna be a good place to live when the largest town is 110,000 people and you have maybe three minority families in the whole state. Buncha cherry pickers is all you are. Doesn't matter squat how big the government is."

It certainly is a nice feeling to get into a nice rhythm here in the Free State. And I don't know if I've mentioned all the trees you're going to see out here in most towns have the effect of cleansing the air and rejuvenating the soul. So I'm not going to jump on the above statement until next time. In fact I'm not jumping on it at all. I will say what strikes me as underlying most strongly the population composition here is a tradition of self-government. Period.

(Sorry about having to bring up the depleted uranium issue.)

(to be continued)