Repeating history?

Dada's May 2007 photo of an El Paso neighborhood living under the
cloud of the possible reopening of a major smelting company that
has already polluted our city into a Super Fund clean-up site status.
Note the cloud this neighborhood of west El Paso is living under.

As I type this my wife and her mother are protesting the reopening of a major metals refining operation here in El Paso. Lots has happened since it closed after the price of copper dropped in 1999: 1.) the company went bankrupt, 2.) El Paso was declared a super fund clean-up site as a result of the contamination around the area of this refinery; 3.) many houses in neighborhoods around the University there had their yards dug up and replaced because of soil contamination from heavy metals such as arsenic and lead (this process continues today; 4.) it was learned this refinery has also burned hazardous wastes in its furnaces and released them through their smokestacks over the city of El Paso.

Flash back with me to the mid-1970's when my wife and I were struggling students trudging over the hills of the University of Texas, El Paso between classes, breathing the toxic fumes heavy in sulfur content that formed an acid when inhaled into one's lungs or swallowed as a kind of between classes toxic "snack".

One of my very favorite fellow art department classmates was a funny girl who made everyone laugh. Her likable husband was a chemist for this refinery just a mile or so from campus. Nice people.

One particular engagement with this delightful couple stands out in my and Mrs. Dada's mind. It was the evening we were invited to their home with several other art majors and their spouses on the grounds of this refinery where they lived in a company house.

Now, I'd like to present to any readers still with me, a satellite picture of the grounds of this refinery.
Please note the blackened earth that resulted from its operation. This is the shock my wife and I experienced that night when we visited our friends in what we can only compare to a visit to another planet. Everything we saw in their company town's neighborhood was black! No yards with green grass. No shubbery, no trees. It was as if we were visiting Mars, or worse, a more formidable planet. It made us both extremely uneasy.

Now El Pasoans are fighting the reopening of this polluter. Frankly, while Dada is hopeful the public succeeds once and for all in nailing the lid shut on the coffin of this polluter forever, I am not optimistic.

Oh, and of my art department friend and her husband who lived on dead earth grounds of this company town? We learned my they have divorced. And while I've no idea if her time residing on the dead Earth of this refinery played a role, but we were shocked to learn she had become a victim of multiple sclerosis.

And now we're preparing to repeat the cycle? Let us pray not.