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A recent NY Times series entitled "Toxic Water" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?emc=eta1) exposed the toxicity of the water in a town near Charleston, W. Virginia. The coal companies had been pumping toxic waste into the local aquifers. Despite the lawsuit brought against them, they were never fined. And despite the Clean Water Act, there have been more than 500,000 violations of the environmental protection laws in the last five years.
What are they thinking? Don't the owners of that coal company wonder where the chemicals are going? Even if they don't care about the children of the towns they've polluted, don't they have children of their own? Do they think the poison is just "going away" because they don't see it anymore? One in ten Americans are exposed to toxic levels of pollutants in their water--from barium to arsenic and everything in between. Do the violators think they are immune, like children who, fascinated by the power of a toilet to flush it all away, magically believe it just goes "away"?
This is a defect not only of character but of reason. And until it is repaired on every level--personal, political, and theological--we are going to wind up like the children in West Virginia with chemical burns on their arms and legs and teeth that have been permanently lost due to corrosion from heavy metals.
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