It’s all statistical,the gross national product or the primelending rate. Yet if our eyes sawin the right spectrum, how it would shine,lurid as magenta neon.If we could smell radiation like seepinggas, if we could sense it as heat, if wecould hear it as a low ominous roarof the earth shifting, then we would not sitand be poisoned while industry spokesmentalk of acceptable millirems and .02cancer per population thousand.We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,and fourteen years later statistics are printedon the rise in leukemia among children.We never see their faces. They never stand,those poisoned children together in a courtyard,and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.The shipyard workers who built nuclearsubmarines, the soldiers who were marchedinto the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-bomb, the people who work in power plants,they die quietly years after in hospitalwards and not on the evening news.The soft spring rain floats down and the airis perfumed with pine and earth.
