Dioxin Dorms Blog :: SUNY New Paltz

матраци

PERHAPS you will be vaguely interested to know that Lois Gibbs, who as a housewife moved nearly 1,000 people off of a toxic waste dump, visited New Paltz two weeks ago.

Hello to all in the Dioxin Dorms and beyond,

Many people are not familiar with homeopathy, a form of medicine invented in the late 1700s that is still used today, though not widely in the United States. If you’ve ever taken those little white sugar pellets for an ailment, ache or pain, you have probably used homeopathy.

Homeopathic remedies can be made from anything. Most of the common ones come from plants or flowers. If you’ve ever taken arnica, that is made from mountain daisy. Others are made from animals (apis for bee stings) or minerals (arsenicum for fear). The odd thing is that a homeopathic remedy is an extreme dilution of the original; extreme meaning you cut the original tincture to a ratio of 1:100 a minimum of 10 times (10th potency or 10CH) and up to 10,000 times (10M potency) or higher; but most common remedies are sold in the 30th potency these days (30CH). These are the kind you get in the health food store in those little blue tubes.

Homeopaths are curious like few other people except maybe astrologers. They want to know the medicinal properties of everything. Some of the newer ones include Coca-Cola, Prozac and dolphin milk. In 2000, some homeopaths made a preparation of dioxin, which was rendered biologically harmless by diluting it well past the chemical limit for the presence of any molecules of the original, but preserving its psychic properties in the process.

The remedy is called dioxonium.

They gave it to a group of people in an experiment, called a proving, and let them report what they felt and experienced. Would it surprise anyone that — looking at an alphabetical list — the only ones that start with the letter A are anger and anxiety?

Being easily angered; causeless anger; anger from waiting. Anxiety came in the form of morning anxiety; anxiety in the stomach; suppressed anxiety; and trembling from anxiety.

Then there the delusions that dioxin causes.

Some of my favorites are: bad will triumph over good, because good is not good enough; body and mind are separated; that one is unprotected in the world; that one is separated and alone in the world; that love is impossible.

Some of the people in the experiment reported apathy to life; apathy to the pleasure of things usually enjoyed; irritability; and the feeling of being forsaken.

Here some of the direct proving notes from the experiment, with information about the chemical we know as dioxin that is in the dioxin dorms on the SUNY New Paltz campus.

One prover said, “My week had been about disillusionment, fear, an undermining fear that took my power away, my hope, my energy. It isolated me from others and it made me want to return to the safety of the womb. It brought me to the edge of my deepest fear – that my life is based on a lie, a false promise. That I could take right action, open my awareness, face my own issues, manifest my vision, contribute on a meaningful spiritual way to family / community / the planet, make a better place, was all a lie. That the big bad world of unscrupulous people, who are after money and don’t have a heart will triumph over good because good is not good enough. There was a promise once that I remember way back (deeply within me). Life goes on and there is something I could, but can’t contribute. What’s the point? Its behind the frame. All tied up. Bound.”

Another prover said, “Special day, my birthday. The strangest un-birthday like day today. First thing in morning felt scared and overwhelmed; sad, on the verge of tears and strangely disconnected. I felt vulnerable, withdrawn and melancholy. No birthday greetings from kids or Mark. I had expectations of being made a fuss of – even though I had set up the day to be busy. I feigned indifference and carried on. All my old feelings of being ignored, not valued and taken for granted came up and that I had to hide my feelings and bake the cakes, etc.”

So there you have it: a psychological profile of dioxin.

Yours and truly,

Eric Francis

Kingston, NY

Hello in the Dioxin Dorms and Beyond,

Last week I was wondering where the rage is. I was wondering how a state college can poison thousands of students, and people on the campus dismiss the reality; parents seem to not care; activists do nothing that will actually get them any attention.

I think I found it the rage. I found it in a discussion with a friend, who was confided in by another (younger) friend (and aspiring PCB activist) earlier this year, that she thought I was a little crazy. Crazy for being so passionate about the issue; and perceived as crazy by others; a nut case. Someone you must distance yourself from a little (which explains the distance). The only reason this offended me was because I thought the younger friend was more intelligent than that. But intelligence does not always determine your freedom from mass psychology.

To understand what is happening on the New Paltz campus, and anywhere there is an environmental issue (which boils down to Planet Earth, at the moment), we need to understand the sociology; the social dynamics involved. The person who blows the whistle is always called crazy. I have seen this many places, and experienced it the entire duration of my work on this particular issue. Lois Gibbs, a hero of said younger friend, was called insane and hated by her neighbors when she tried to evacuate Love Canal in the late 1970s. Lois persisted, and had 700 families moved to safety.

Now people kiss her feet. They should, particularly if they ever decreed her a nut because the State Health Department said your home was safe — even as they said you should not go in your basement for more than one minute and 50 seconds.

My editors, usually hip to what truth-tellers go through, have even had to take shit from SUNY administrators who have insisted that I am a nut. Laughable as it is, this must get filed under “sad but true.”

Students, parents and community members who join that perception (that the whistleblower is a nut), however slightly, are basically joining a) the polluters’ fundamental worldview and b) joining the mass of those who are rolling over or suppressing reality so that they don’t personally have to cope with the reality or pain of the situation. We call this denial, but it’s a special kind of denial.

It is simpler to say the person who points out the obvious is a nut and go on with your day. Heck, it’s easy, and there is no personal risk on the social level. You keep your friends. And there is lots of proof! After all, the nut is saying something that nobody really believes.

By being silent, by refusing to express one’s own rage, or take solid, effective action that gets them noticed, one is protecting oneself from being accused of being crazy or irrational because intuitively we know some or many people will see us that way — which most people cannot bear. People have a profound need to be viewed as socially acceptable, so it’s best not to scream or speak too loud.

It’s not that people don’t care about the dioxin dorms — it’s that they care about something else more, which is being seen as a sane person. To speak up, you have to risk getting dismissed on the basis of irrationality. I don’t blame anyone for not doing so — it hurts. At the end of the day, all we really have is our ability to be a participant in our culture, and if one is deemed crazy, that can be difficult — if you take it on. It hurts to be labeled. It hurts to be called unacceptable. Everyone knows this.

Because I have been confronted by actual mental illness in one form or another for many years, mainly through my family and (among other things) living less than a block away from King’s County Hospital’s psych ward as a child, I am not ignorant. I know what crazy is, and how painful it is; so if I’m called a nut case for being willing to speak up about dioxin, I can brush it off.

If you’re young, if you’re uncertain about yourself, if you’re uncomfortable in your skin, if you’re not feeling too stable, or if this is all too much; or if you need to be a “popular person,” you have another problem. You’re likely to go along with a lie on one or more levels just so that your friends don’t think you’re too weird. And this can cost you your life, or your conscience.

This is an old issue. A play was written in 1882, called An Enemy of the People. It was written more than 125 years ago — i.e., before chlorine; before the car; before the industrial revolution was understood. Here is the plot summary. I learned about this play from my old lawyer, Alan Sussman, who represented me when I prosecuted the campus for banning me after I attempted to interview the college president.

It is true: if you speak up, they will call you nuts.

If you’re not strong, you may believe it.

Take care of yourself, and hey, don’t take any shit.

Catch you soon…

e

– Eric Francis, Kingston, NY

Plot Summary: An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

Dr. Stockmann is the popular citizen of a small coastal town in Norway. The town has recently invested a large amount of public and private money towards the development of baths, a project led by Dr. Stockmann and his brother, the Mayor. The town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the new baths, said to be of great medicinal value and as such, the baths are the pride of the town. However, as the baths are starting to succeed, Dr. Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the baths causing serious illness among the tourists. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, which includes a proposed solution, which would come at a considerable cost to the town.

But to his surprise, Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to publicly acknowledge and address the problem because it could mean financial ruin for the town. As the conflict ensues, the Mayor warns his brother that he should “acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community”. Stockmann refuses to accept this, and rents a hall in order to hold a town meeting and convince the people to close the baths.

The townspeople – eagerly awaiting the prosperity that the baths are believed will bring – refuse to accept Stockmann’s claims, as his friends and allies, who had explicitly given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an “Enemy of the People.” In a scathing rebuke of both the Victorian notion of community and the principles of democracy, Dr. Stockmann proclaims that in matters of right and wrong, the individual is superior to the multitude, who are easily led by self-advancing demagogues. Stockmann sums up Ibsen’s denunciation of the masses, with the memorable quote “…the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.”

I MET with a couple of New Paltz students the other night to discuss the dioxin issue, and I explained to them a legal theory that pretty much sets the ground of the conversation.

The SUNY New Paltz administration is killing students. That is the basis of the whole discussion. They have a license to kill (state document 0549P by Drs. Kim and Hawley, dated July 1985). But killing is killing, if you have a hunting permit or not, and whether you use dioxin or an Uzi.

Under American law, a person has a right to self-defense in their own home, and to defend their family. In other words, if you’re a guest in my house, and an armed assailant breaks in and tries to assault you, I have a right and indeed a duty to disable or even kill the attacker if I need to, in order to protect us. I may be tried for manslaughter, but depending on the evidence, probably not.

I would argue (from a purely rhetorical standpoint, such as a law school debate) that that defending ourselves physically against SUNY administrators who poison students should be perfectly legal. It would be, after all, an act of self-defense. Every American understands that, right? Don’t half of us carry guns? Why do we have them? Well of course – self-defense; just in case.

That, however, is not why I have come to this planet as a writer. The pen is mightier than the sword, or the gun, and I am Quaker; we shun violence if we can, we walk out of wars, and we know there are better solutions. I personally never touch firearms. Gandhi proved that there is a better way. Many have demonstrated this same basic fact.

But let’s not forget that when we work on this issue, we are acting in self-defense. In working to close the dorms, we are working to stop premeditated mass murder. Oh, it’s the clean, friendly kind of murder; no blood is shed; nobody gets their clothes dirty, until the leukemia ward.

I would say that, respecting the value on human life, there are no limits on what we should do to get the students out of the dioxin dorms. We who are fighting the issue have agreed to play like ladies and gentlemen: with computers, notebooks, tape recorders and through using the political process. We have agreed to talk things through, even as the bad guys soak our friends with dioxin and PCBs. As this happens, we have to act like we have all the time in the world – in the face of an imminent threat.

Here is the problem. And it is a big one: it seems that nobody has the strength to get angry about this. Well, I do, and people think I’m weird. But I went to therapy, and I learned how to let my anger out, and how to turn it into power. I suggested to the students that we set up a Gestalt Therapy styled workshop with sticks and pillows and get in the mood to express our rage; to loosen up the chunks of ice, and let it out. To learn how to scream, to yell, cry about this, to feel the fear and the disgust, and process the rage and get free of it – so that we can work effectively however we need to do it.

Most of the students and student activists who are either contamination victims are what I would call docile. Nobody breaks a sweat. I have not seen anyone (besides me) raise their voice. I have not heard anyone (until I pressed them a few nights ago) so much as admit they are angry.

Well now, what are we going to get done, in that case? This is not a video game. I would propose that we need to express more emotion than when using a PlayStation.

Students who live in Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder halls: you may not be angry today. But if you are one of the unfortunate ones who ends up with cancer as a young adult, or sterile, or in agony from endometriosis, you will be angry then. Tap into it now, while it can do you some good.

MONDAY promises to be a difficult day for Sandy Hess, the executive secretary to SUNY New Paltz Prez Steve Poskanzer. Sandy is, by dint of her job, the flak catcher for Dr. Steve. She guards the gate, and answers the phone if you get as far as his office. Monday, a lot of parents will be doing just that.

This weekend was Parents’ Weekend at the college. That means a lot of moms and dads came up to visit their sons and daughters and get an earful from the administration. Most of that happened at an event Saturday night at the Studley Theater (built in 1919).

Students from the group Synthesis and their friends at SDS did a little informational direct action. They dressed in back, like ushers, slipped in the door, and as parents and students filled the theater, they passed out an informational letter about the PCB and dioxin crisis in Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder halls.

I read the letter late last week; the students asked me to edit it and make sure they had their facts right. Mostly I tightened up the formatting and added a bit of punctuation; the letter was basically perfect, touching on all the key points, getting the history right and maintaining a clear, concerned tone. Jenna Dern was the main author; she’s been a student of PCBs for more than six months now, and she’s learning this very difficult topic well (she’s a Taurus — the info takes a while to get in, then when it’s there, it’s like a library with a good catalog).

Saturday’s direct action gets the perfect 10 rating from Dioxin Dorms. It was designed to inform those who are getting contaminated about the issue — see our mission statement. Currently, this is the only thing that will save lives.

It cost a few dollars make the copies. Students giving out this kind of information is the college’s worst nightmare — all those parents finding out at a public event. So it had a very high psychological value and nuisance value, which is part of what makes a good direct action.

There was no risk to the students and their friends; even the New Paltz admin seems unlikely to do anything too stupid with all those parents around, but you never know. Anyway, the minute a student is arrested for giving out a leaflet, the campus will be hearing from a civil rights lawyer (and New Paltz grad) who is watching this issue carefully with great interest.

Most of all, it was FUN. It’s quite a rush doing something so subversive.

Monday, however, will probably not be so much fun for Sandy. So I’m here to send a dozen roses for she who must catch the flak, and remind her that it is indeed her boss’s problem. Of course there remains the issue of what to do if you are one of many people at SUNY New Paltz who feels your job is on the line if you tell the truth, or even admit the truth to yourself.

But that is a blog for another day.

SORRY this reply took two weeks, not overnight as planned. But that’s the way this issue sometimes goes: in fits and starts. I’ll have more news at the end of the reply about some developments on campus and how to get involved.

On Sept. 9, a parent wrote to the Parents’ Forum:

“My daughter lived in Gage last year and is a resident again this year. This is the first I have ever heard about the PCB and dioxin issue and I find this very concerning. Why were students and parents never made aware of this situation, even if it was ‘under control’ by New Paltz? I have signed forms in the past where I was made aware that lead paint was used in a building but had been removed. Why is this any different?”

Correct: it’s not any different; but the stakes are higher, and this is a scandal that has not been rectified. Lead was a “minor” issue for many years until the collective brain of the American public decided it was a serious issue; now it’s big news. Chemicals, however, still have a good image (they make all our Western world goodness possible), or their image is so tainted that everyone realizes that sooner or later, one of ‘em is gonna getcha.

However, what we need to come to grips with is that what’s happening at New Paltz is fraud. In other words, someone is consciously misrepresenting the truth, from a position of authority, and someone inclined to give them credibility falls for it; and, the kicker, they are hurt by the lie.

Now, most students living in Bliss, Capen, Gage or Scudder (BCGS) don’t know they’re hurt; they deny it; it’s a rumor that’s probably not true, etc. Or, they know it’s true deep down, but feel powerless to do anything about it. But the fact remains: they are being lied to, and hurt as a result of those lies.

The parent continues:

“Last year my daughter always had a bad cough and went to the health center on campus numerous times to determine the cause. Doctors there said it might be allergies and gave her some medicine. It didn’t go away and they suspected whopping cough, gave her some medicine and never got better. This cycle continued at the health center for the entire year. Every time my daughter would come home though her cough was pretty much non-existent and we assumed she was just getting better. This year, her cough has already come back and now I hear of this PCB accident that occurred on campus.”

She asks what to do. The answer, according to our resident epidemiologist, is to get out before the symptoms become permanent. They sound like they’re getting close to permanent; and such visible symptoms typically come with a level of systemic damage deeper in the body that cannot be seen without special tests.

But the point is not the tests; nobody can legitimately doubt that PCBs and dioxins are in those dorms. They are there; we all agree, including the State of New York. It just comes down to the opinion of certain scientists who are hired by the state who say it’s safe. That does not make it safe.

When we hear about this issue and think about it coherently for five minutes, it’s heroic to think that we might want to do something and save everyone and shut down the buildings. What you really need to do is get your daughter out of there. Then let’s save the world.

Speaking of saving the world, I’ve heard that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is meeting to discuss PCBs in the Honors Center in College Hall at 8 pm on Thursday, Sept. 27.

Monday night, there is a meeting of something called the Council of Organizations that will take up the issue as a coalition. I don’t have the exact data on that meeting, but there’s time to check The Oracle or a Student Association meeting agenda.

– Eric Francis, Kingston, NY

A reader recently posted this to the Parents’ Forum. It is an example of the tone of voice and spirit when someone is sincerely concerned about their son or daughter. I am frankly amazed that we have not heard more concerns. It is a sign that most people do not take this situation seriously. I will have a reply tomorrow. — efc

My daughter lived in Gage last year and is a resident again this year. This is the first I have ever heard about the PCB and dioxin issue and I find this very concerning. Why were students and parents never made aware of this situation, even if it was “under control” by New Paltz? I have signed forms in the past where I was made aware that lead paint was used in a building but had been removed. Why is this any different?

Last year my daughter always had a bad cough and went to the health center on campus numerous times to determine the cause. Doctors there said it might be allergies and gave her some medicine. It didn’t go away and they suspected whopping cough, gave her some medicine and never got better. This cycle continued at the health center for the enitre year. Every time my daughter would come home though her cough was pretty much non-existent and we assumed she was just getting better. This year, her cough has already come back and now I hear of this PCB accident that occurred on campus. My daughter mentioned to me that a couple of her friends in the dorm were experiencing the same symptoms. Why would New Paltz and the health center not investigate this problem if many students were complaining of the same thing, especially knowing the history of these dorms? I find it very suspicious.

I want my daughter to move out so she doesn’t have to suffer anymore, but how will New Paltz accomodate her and all the other students who may want to do the same?

I also saw there is a blood test that can be done to detect PCBs, should New Paltz be required to administer these tests free of charge to all students who care to have it done?

Does anyone have any thoughts or similar concerns?

Hello in the dioxin dorms, and the rest of yuz. The past week I’ve been doing some follow-up work around the dioxin dorms, and I’ve been noticing that not so many people have heard of the problem. Okay, maybe half. And many of them think the issue is a joke; the state says it’s safe, la la la. To me, it’s as reassuring as being caught in the midst of an armed robbery.

So hey all you slackers, would you please tell your roommates and hallmates about this website, so they may have a chance to decide whether they want to risk endometriosis, birth defects, immune suppression and cancer for their very own?

We, the dioxin freaks of dioxin dorms, feel that everyone has a right to make these decisions for themselves. And beware that you who think it’s safe today may have no clue how it is that you got sick “out of nowhere” one day in 2014. Anyway, please talk it up, even if you feel like a jerk.

– Eric Francis

Hello to all in the dioxin dorms, and beyond. In a little while I have an interview for a Public Television segment on living in a toxic world. The theme of the program is, “How safe is safe?” and, “How do we live in a toxic world?”

But those are not the real questions. The real question is, “Who decides who gets poisoned?”

If you live in the dioxin dorms, you live there as a matter of state policy. Someone made the decision to have you be there. The decision was based on money and liability; putting you in a toxic place saved enough money, and was sufficiently unlikely to cause liability (not disease) that the decision was made to contaminate your body, and potentially those of your children.

In othe words, the dorms are safe — for the bureaucrats who put you there. They are not safe for you; but it was decided that you were sufficiently unlikely to bring a lawsuit, or connect your illness to the dorms, such that it is safe for the State of New York to keep you there.

Isn’t that disgusting? Well, it is if you think about it.

– Eric Francis, in New Paltz