Do we need a new petition, asking us to shut down our infrastructure?
In 2002, when Indian Point discussion was current, and relevant to ongoing public events, Mr. Ross Weale jr. started a "Close Indian Point" petition. With great effort, utilizing every associated activist group then in operation, teams of canvassers were sent out with clipboards, through the entire region , in a maximum signup effort, with over 100 core canvassers gaining about 8000 signatures. This was the high tide of anti Indian Point concern, and the high tide of activist cross-cooperation, and it garnered 8000 signatures. Never closed, that petition sits online with about 10,000 signatures, the last 2000 having dribbled in, in the intervening 5 years, through the few web activism sites still remaining, the response diminishing steadily over time.
Simultaneously with Mr Weale's creation, a pro-Indian Point petition was begun by those friendly to Indian point. That petition quickly and easily garnered 13,000 signatures, thanks to the efforts of town residents, friends, and workers at or around the plant. It too sits online today, now abandoned, after the 13,000 to 8,000 drubbing given to the supposed "widespread anti coalition" at its own high point in early 2003. There was no further need to demonstrate that the greatest possible efforts of the naysayers, had met up with an almost casual landslide from the silent majority, had definitively lost, and had walked away, sadder but wiser.
What has changed?
The isolated gaggle of bloggers now proposing a new petition, is obviously unaware of this minor piece of local history, and that is sad. However, general feelings in the populace are moving away from nuclear jitters, and swinging toward taxation anxiety, and lifestyle anxiety , in the tough years after Iraq, and into 2007, when what had seemed assured previously, now looks to evaporate in a tide of lost Mirant tax suits, skyrocketing school taxes, a broken housing bubble, and a massive campesino invasion from central America, putting the very stability & viability of the region at risk.
Who is it, that is asking us to revisit the worst months of our lives, the months after September 2001, for strategies on living in 2007 and beyond? We need NEW strategies, ones that ought to be looking to better lives ahead, putting all the shibboleths of the discredited Bush regime behind us forever, especially any false terror fear, or malicious faux "activism", abused covertly for personal power, or gain.(or for no good reason at all).
The monumental impossibility of ever building new infrastructure is becoming more and more clear, as the TZ bridge sits crumbling, route 9 remains a relic of the 1920's, routes 119 and 35 are totally overwhelmed with no enlargements in sight, and White Plains itself sinks slowly into semi-permanent ghetto-hood, despite "renewal" after "renewal", and the jewel in Westchester's crown, the Southern Westchester Children's hospital, gets spun off, simply because it was planned in an earlier, more deep-pocketed time, and we simply can no longer afford it, or anything else like it.
So let us not be so anxious to dig ourselves into a bond-issue hole, inside a lost-electricity trench,
holding a still-radioactive non-producing Indian Point, while new avalanches still unseen, of the 2010's, and the 2020's bury us, and all our future hopes.
We must use what we have to survive. We must manage it , use it, and protect it. To do otherwise would be foolhardy at best, and criminal at worst. Let Indian Point be.
