2025 Life Logs, Day 47: In Honor of Public Employees and Agencies
Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Weather: Snow Turning to Rain Overnight, Rain All Day; High Temp 49, Low 26 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
On October 18, 2005, my first blog post appeared on handleysail.com. A few family members and close friends were following it to get the daily news from Windbird at sea. Sometime during that first year a man named Rich started following us on the blog and we had a regular back on forth on email until Mark’s death in 2016. Sometimes we were seeking information from Rich and sometimes he was seeking information from us. Somewhere along the way, I realized we had totally different political views, but that certainly didn’t affect our friendship.
I got an email from Rich after my post last Wednesday where I declared the rollercoaster had gone off the rails in Washington, DC. In our back-and-forth communication since, Rich told me that he can’t remember if he became a Republican when Reagan ran for office or because of what Reagan did in office. And that got me to thinking about how much I disliked Ronald Reagan. I felt totally gob smacked when Reagan declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” My life experiences to that time led me to feel the exact opposite.
Then this morning I watched an interview with Michael Lewis who edited a series in the Washington Post last year called “Who is the Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service?” In mid-March a book he has edited from that material will be available. Lewis maintains the claims of ‘deep state’ are off base. Yes, there are places for trim and reform, but he says the public workforce are individuals dedicated to the public good. In his world, the government’s mission is to keep us safe. He went on to say the government tackles the problems you can’t make money solving and that the government agencies that are in existence to protect us cannot be run like a business. Should someone tell that to Elon Musk and his partner in crime, Donald Trump?
This got me to thinking of how my life would be so different if I had not had the support of government agencies to help me along the way. And in one case, how my life could have been different if there was a public safety agency at the time. I was born in Nitro, West Virginia, which is on the Kanawha River. The Kanawha runs into the Ohio River, then on to the Mississippi and out into the Gulf of Mexico. I refuse to call it the Gulf of America. Because of that, Nitro and the towns upriver from it were the home of almost every chemical plant you can name. Monsanto, Allied Chemical, and numerous other smaller chemical plants were located in my little town of Nitro. In the next town, there was Union Carbide. And on upriver there was DuPont and FMC and more. All of this in a 15-mile radius from where I grew up. The pollution was ghastly. You could smell the river, where the chemical plants freely dumped their waste, every time you turned on your faucet to get a drink of water. There was no way to complain, as almost everyone who lived there worked in those plants. Chemicals were our bread and butter. During the fall of my senior year in high school, my 33-year-old brother who was a head lab analyst at Monsanto, suddenly died of a pancreatic ‘issue’. The agriculture division at Monsanto was producing the herbicide 2,4,5-T that was in the Agent Orange the US military sprayed across Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. My brother was doing open vial testing. We’ll never know if doing open vial testing, which was later banned by OSHA when it was created in 1970, was a contributing factor in my brother’s death, but the United States Environmental Protection Agency that was created at the same time as OSHA has saved thousands of lives since then. These agencies are filled with people who have dedicated their lives to making all of our lives safer. We owe them our respect and support.
How else would my life be different if federal agencies had not been there to support me? I would probably have never been able to go to college. I had four older brothers and sisters, but none of them had gone to college. Neither of my parents had any education beyond 8th grade. And my father did not believe that girls should go to college. Women were to be secretaries and then wives and mothers in his opinion. But the Federal Work-Study Program was established by Congress as part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. This program’s purpose was to assist students with financial need by providing part-time jobs on campuses, and if possible, those jobs were to be related to the student’s field of study. I graduated from high school in 1965 and the Higher Education Act was passed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda for this country. My father worked at Allied Chemical, but his pay was below the poverty line at the time. If I wanted to go to college, I had to do it totally on my own. Without the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, sometimes referred to as the Office of Education (now the Department of Education), and their work study and loan programs, I would not have been able to go to college. Today the US Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office administers the federal grants for college students. It is the biggest provider of financial aid for students in this country. If the current administration gets rid of the Department of Education, who is going to administer these loans? Elon Musk?
I could go on with story after story of how Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal domestic programs between 1933 and 1938 helped my parents and members of their families. All of my brothers and sisters were born between 1928 and 1935 and my dad had to move the family several times to go to where there were jobs. He even hitch-hiked over 100 miles each way to work in the mines from time to time, coming home on the weekends if he could get a ride. But with his determination and the help of the federal government, they survived. My father did not believe in what he called ‘government handouts’. He would never accept them, but he and my family knew that FDR and the federal government had their backs.
Maybe each of us needs to write our stories about how the federal government has always been there to help when help was needed and send those letters to Washington. But now I am going to ignore all this and go watch the 50th Anniversary of Saturday Night Live!!!
