You Can See the Future in East Palestine

It's not pretty.

Grandfailure

In my late teens, I read a novel called White Noise.

It changed my life forever.

If you’re unfamiliar, Don DeLillo conducts a relatively savage critique of American values. The stoic, laconic humor just drives the knife deeper. You get the sense that the author doesn’t expect things to change.

Spoiler alert: The main character gets poisoned in a toxic event. It’s not just eerily similar. DeLillo predicts every detail, right down to poetic descriptions of the apocalyptic clouds that fill the sky. For weeks, the rust belt town where the accident occurs experiences hauntingly beautiful sunsets that sound exactly like the rainbow colored water in East Palestine now.

A lot of my friends and professors expressed hesitant admiration for DeLillo. On the one hand, they admired his prose style. A lot of them felt that DeLillo presented caricatures of people, though. There wasn’t much substance to his characters beyond the ideologies they present. Most of them are unlikable.

Now I get it.

They didn’t like DeLillo because he doesn’t indulge their sentimental attitudes about humans, that somehow we’re all good inside. Nope, most people are assholes. DeLillo understood us better than most writers. He simply didn’t paint a flattering portrait of humanity that made readers feel good.

Over the last 20 years, Americans have done nothing but prove DeLillo right over and over again. Now we’ve recreated the exact toxic event that his critics considered implausible, something that would never happen in America. He even predicts the way the news media would cover it, first with dystopian glee, followed by a total apathy toward a town whose only real claim to fame is a Department of Hitler Studies and the Most Photographed Barn in America. The government won’t even tell the main character whether he’s going to be okay, or what he’s been exposed to. He tries to get tested, but it comes back inconclusive.

When you start recreating entire plot lines from satirical dystopian novels, it’s safe to say your society has lost its way.

You see these stories everywhere in East Palestine. I’ve been watching videos and interviews of residents trying to pick up their lives. They complain about headaches, swollen lymph nodes, and burning skin. One man spent thousands of dollars to renovate his house. Now he can’t live in it. He’s not sure he’ll even be able to sell it, certainly not for what it’s worth.

If you want a good breakdown of the crisis, here’s Mitchell Petersen: “Americans had extra-long trains carrying carcinogenic toxins operating with very few engineers who were worked to their physical limits.”

In another article, Same Lacey details how Joe Biden, the avuncular sadist in chief, essentially rubber-stamped an organized campaign among railroad tycoons to maximize profits at the expense of pretty much everything. In particular, precision scheduled railroading is capitalism at its worst. They’re basically cannibalizing railroads until there’s nothing left.

Yep, that sums it up.

There’s no conspiracy here, as some people are speculating as the news media jumps on any and all train derailments, pumping adrenaline rather than putting them into context. As it turns out, trains carrying toxic chemicals actually derail and crash on a pretty regular basis. Isn’t that nice?

The railroad companies knew about all these safety problems long before they became the latest doom fodder, and they did f*ck all about it. If anything, they’re actively lobbying for lower safety standards because it saves them money, and our government is actually thinking about letting that fly. So we can expect more derailments. It’s already a miracle we don’t have an East Palestine every Tuesday. The assholes in charge seem fine with that scenario.

As for the literal fallout, who knows how bad it’s going to get? It’s going to take scientists months to run their tests and wrap their heads around the magnitude of this screwup. The plume didn’t burn off into space like the billionaires hoped. It got trapped and wound up spreading and dispersing over hundreds of miles. We haven’t even begun to understand the consequences, all the ecological damage and all the illness it’s going to cause.

Once again, the immediate threat has subsided. The scary clouds are gone. Our leaders are telling us everything’s fine. They want the residents of East Palestine to get back to work and act like they haven’t just lived through intense mental and physical trauma, and that they might or might not be poisoned. Two weeks later, residents still report noxious odors.

They feel physically sick.

The mayor says he’s concerned. Of course, they’re being ignored. The residents of East Palestine are being told it’s okay for them to be continually exposed to the lingering fumes of vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen, after tens of thousands of gallons of it saturated the ground of their hometown near their water supply. If I could still smell it in the air, I don’t think I’d believe “test results.” Unfortunately, many of them are trapped there.

Here’s the worst part:

There’s a handful of places around the world that stand a chance against global warming. They produce food. They have access to plenty of water. They aren’t expected to undergo the same extreme heatwaves and droughts as everywhere else. Ohio was one of those places.

So, throw this train derailment onto the pile of wakeup calls going largely ignored. Head over to CNN and you’ll see their top story: Why did McDonald’s get rid of their golden arches? Americans deserve answers.

DeLillo would be proud.