What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (One World Essentials)

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional.

“Safe until proven dangerous” became known as Kehoe’s Paradigm, or the Kehoe Rule. The approach was later taken by climate change deniers. The public health approach, however, is far wiser than the Kehoe Rule. The Precautionary Principle holds that a product or chemical should be considered unsafe unless the manufacturer can prove otherwise.

Give me a fucking break. I had been stalking and harassing the state health offices with concerns, inquiries, and warnings for weeks. Nobody cared. Nobody gave a shit. Now suddenly I was in trouble for not being in touch with Governor Snyder directly? You have to be fucking kidding. They were trying to cover their asses in so many different ways at once, it was stunning. And somehow it was all my fault.

Didn’t Lyon care about protecting kids? Didn’t he care about science? No, I think all he cared about was winning. It was risky, a gamble. He had to count on the fact that nobody else in his agency, or the governor’s office, would come along and care about kids or science either.