Bob Koehler: Hold The Mushrooms!!

Bob Koehler is a wonderful columnist IMVHO and this week he brought us some really good news, so I would be guilty of negligence if I didn't share it. In Bob's words:

Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest — the same stuff that legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago — enabled a bunch of little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and win.

This unprecedented development must be savored. Divine Strake, the simulated nuclear blast the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was initially planning to set off nine months ago at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas — which would have raised a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud of god-knows-what — has been scrapped for good. After several postponements and a round of power-point presentations at various locations downwind of the test site that did nothing but fuel people’s outrage, it ain’t gonna happen.

“There was such a public outcry,” said Salt Lake City resident Mary Dickson of Downwinders, one of the organizations leading the fight against the blast, the possibility of which revived hellish memories of the era of above-ground testing that ended in 1962. “I like to think the people will prevail, so I can go on thinking this fighting we do does matter,” Dickson, a cancer survivor, told me. “I just want people to know, if they think they can’t make a difference, look at this case.”

“Back in the ’50s,” said Idahoan Preston Truman, who heads Downwinders, “we were given a booklet on the first day of kindergarten that said, ‘You people who live near the test site are, in a very real sense, active participants in this nation’s testing program.’ Well, I think it just got demonstrated!”

Great stuff here from our friend in Chicago. Please click through and read the whole article. It's well worth the few minutes it'll take you.