Residents living in the Detroit zip code 48217 area sent a letter to U.S. Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land, asking her to spend some time in their community so that she could experience first-hand the effects corporate polluters – who support Land’s campaign – and their pollution are having on their health.
Land refused to even accept the letter, much less agree to meet with the people who would be her constituents if she were to be elected.
Today, those same residents of Michigan’s most highly polluted community took the conversation to Land’s hometown of Byron Center in an attempt to get her to listen to them. Along with their original letter, the residents brought with them the results of soil testing from their community as well as from Bicentennial Park near Land’s home in Byron Center.
They tested ten soil samples from homes in Detroit’s 48217 neighborhood along with five samples from Bicentennial Park. The results are shocking: The average level of lead contamination in the Detroit samples is 434.4 ppm, while the average level of lead contamination in the samples at Bicentennial Park is only 14.38 ppm. In other words, the lead contamination in 48217 is over THIRTY TIMES HIGHER than in Bicentennial Park.
Progress Michigan explains the significance of these findings in a press release this morning:
The University of Massachusetts Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Laboratory has recommended that people living in areas with medium levels of lead contamination, “restrict access of children to these soils by maintaining dense cover” and refrain from “grow[ing] leafy green vegetables or root crops in this soil.”“Does Terri Lynn Land think it’s safe for children to play outside in 48217?” asked Sherry Griswold, a resident of Detroit’s 48217 community who has experienced severe physical impacts from the pollution. “We think Terri Lynn Land should have the decency to talk to us.”
These residents deserve to at least be acknowledged by Land. Her policies regarding deregulation and the support she enjoys from corporate polluters deserve answers from the people who pay the price for the impacts of industrial pollution. They deserve to know why Land supports loosening regulations on these polluters when its clear that current regulations are failing the citizens in their community.
Land has spent an enormous amount of time talking about how she is “a mom with two kids” lately (although it’s worth noting both of her kids are adults now and she’s actually in the rental business with her son.) Land repeated some version of the phrase “I’m a mom with two kids” at least seven times (I counted eight) during a radio call-in show last week. It turns out that this was no accident. Aided by the ever never credible Breitbart.com, Land has resorted to trotting out the lamely laughable and ludicrous suggestion that Democrats are “attacking her for being a mom”. She’s even suggesting that she wants to go to Washington to give everyone a time-out, running this self-parodying meme on Facebook:
Wait, does that mean Land is advocating for yet another government shutdown???
At any rate, it’s clear, based on these pathetically desperate efforts to do something – ANYTHING – to resuscitate her dying campaign, that Land has wasted a whole lot of conservative, corporatist political financial investments over the past year.
You would think that a mom like her would have a deeper concern for the children in the state she wants to represent.
Apparently not.
[Caricature by DonkeyHotey for Eclectablog. Adapted from: Wikipedia – State of MI / HHS – Chris Smith]
