Racial Trickle-downs. Part One

Victor Davis Hanson

A February 3rd huge train derailment recently sent fire balls high into the sky over small East Palestine, Ohio (ca. 5,000 population), in the heartland of the rustbelt of post-industrial America. I guess the current administration would call this small-town clinger/deplorable/chums/dregs country, to paraphrase the past usage of Obama, Hillary, and Biden.

Three days later, in worry about the contents of ten of the derailed 50 rail cars, authorities conducted a controlled release and burn of hazardous chemicals, including butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride. They said they sought to avoid the dangers of the leaks leading to a huge gaseous explosion.

And so they created a huge black plume that soon covered the small town. Amid the foul air, domestic chickens were said to have dropped dead. Townspeople were evacuated complaining of headaches, burning eyes, and troubled breathing. Wildlife was found dead, including fish in the rivers and ponds.

My point of all this? There was almost no media coverage? No Al Gore weighing in on climate change. No Pete Buttigieg, the racialist obsessor, claiming that the suffering community was inordinately of one race. No Joe Biden pandering about the poor and forgotten being treated asymmetrically by America.

Thus, there was no Biden communique about harming mother earth or carcinogenic dangers to the unborn. The EPA kept silent, although it weighs in on every incidence of purported “environmental racism” when drinking water is considered contaminated by “them.”

East Palestine is working-class and 98 percent white. Does the fact of the usual slurs of white privilege/white supremacy/white rage explain why our government just shrugged in the town’s crisis? Almost callous Ohio medical officials explained away the clouds of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate as “stuff happens” and no more dangerous than filling you gas tank up at the neighborhood station.

So consider:

1. Why does the EPA lecture on the dangers of using inert PVCs but not about this burn? Why have they required warning labels on about everything we buy, but not address the plume?

2. Why are pipelines considered taboo but more dangerous railcar transportation, at least in the case of gas and oil, is considered A-OK?

3. Was the neglect of East Palestine “environmental racism/classism”?

That is, if the toxic chemicals had been torched by a corporation on the cue of the state government in a railyard in Newark or Compton would there have been comparable nonchalance? Or how about in upper-class Atherton, Brentwood, the Upper Westside, or Seaport? Would the government, state and federal, have simply lectured those latter residents that their dead parrots, somnolent poodles, and sick Burmese cats, their burning lungs and nausea, were mere symptoms no more dangerous than getting a whiff of gasoline when filling up?

4. Given that the EPA seeks out farmers if rain runoff collects in their lands’ low spots, and thus can be classified “inland waterways” allowing federal inspection for nitrates, and given farmers are sometimes fined when these puddles don’t past EPA muster, why would we ever trust such an agency again? Is it the green version of the FBI or CIA?

5. In the midst of this disaster, Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary, was lecturing “racist” Americans that their hardhat work crews must look like the composition of the surrounding community in which they are working. Aside from being a bit off topic from transportation, was Buttigieg’s usual racist diatribe a window into why he slept during the February 3rd wreck—or does he always sleep during crises, as he slept during the last 4 airliner near misses, the airport Christmas holiday shutdowns, the L.A. port back-up, and the Wild-West looting of trains going in and out of the port of L.A.? Are his nonstop purportedly “racist” histories of freeway construction of the 1950s more important than the airline industry disaster of today or the supply shortages of tomorrow?