No amount of money can buy back our kids' health once it's gone. But as parents, we'd be essentially forced to feed our kids poison if fracking for "natural" gas begins near our homes. How can we protect our children -- and grandchildren, and beloveds, and pets, and property, and ourselves -- if corporate-state collusion forces frack contamination of our water, food supplies, and communities? We must BAN FRACKING NOW.

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Drat! Rat poop in the pancake mix. I promised the kids pancakes this morning! Can't afford to buy another box, and besides, who has time? I'll just add some chocolate chips and raisins--they'll never know the difference. A little rat poop won't kill 'em.

Uh . . . should this person be parenting?

We might be horrified at her attitude, and her kids would surely be taken from her if anyone were to send child-protection authorities to investigate. But she's actually no worse than any other parent who's trying to do the right thing by her kids, but making some terrible decisions. Or having no choice.

This mother is jeopardizing her kids' health in many ways--just as is every a parent who's leased her land to gas frackers. But if she didn't lease her land, and fracking is going to happen anyway, she might as well be feeding her kids rat poop.

Rat droppings can cause a number of diseases, including hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, whose symptoms include headaches, dizziness, and chills, as well as abdominal problems such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and severe pain. HPS is fatal in about 38 percent of cases.

Among the diseases caused by fracking chemicals are respiratory diseases. Because fracking corporations (corporate "persons" under current law) have more rights than actual human persons, and operate with such secrecy than even emergency room doctors can't find out what poisons to treat exposed patients for, we'll never know just how many of these diseases will be fatal.

Oh no! Glass shards in the orange juice. Well, at least they're clear and you can't see them. And they're small enough, they should go down the kids' little throats without hurting anything too serious.

Glass shards can rip delicate tissues in children and adults. No sane parent would allow his child to swallow them. But the chemicals used in fracking include those that directly affect our tissues; that disrupt our bodies' systems, including our reproductive function; that hurt fetal development (when we are able to reproduce); mess with our nervous system and behavior; and frack up our immune systems.

Would anyone sane play with her kid's health this way?

Playing with our kids' health is just what we do if we open our land up to fracking, or allow our community to embrace this supposedly-good-for-the-local-economy activity.

There's so much traffic out front today with that big sale at the mall. I hope the boys are keeping an eye on Tessa. My little angel, she's the quickest of them all. Not even seven months old when she started to walk last week! And now she's running all over the place. Maybe she'll be a tennis star someday!

No sane parent would send her toddler out to play in the street, especially in known heavy traffic. The number of trucks (up to 1,440 truck trips per fracked well) passing through a small town or rural area will endanger pedestrians while destroying roads and clogging the air with diesel exhaust. Adding to the air quality problems are gas storage tanks and compressors. In Fort Worth, Texas, where the Barnett shale is being fracked, they cause as much smog as all vehicle traffic in the area. In Dish, Texas, where many pipelines and compressor stations are situated, thousands of trees have died, farm animals have expired of unexplained causes, and people have developed a range of unusual health conditions.

I wish I'd reminded Tommy to make sure he put the safety on his 22. Well, the kids will all be in for breakfast in a couple minutes.

Guns with ammo and no safety, well, we might as well feed our kids arsenic directly. Among the chemicals used in fracking -- which WILL and DOES, not "might," end up in drinking water, maybe yours, maybe not -- are arsenic, barium, benzene, ethylbenzene, ethylene glycol, formaldehyde, glycol ethers, hydrochloric acid, methanol, napthlalene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, sodium hydroxide, toluene, and xylene.

Whose drinking water will this stuff poison? Whose air? Whose food supply? With whose lives are we willing to gamble? Who is willing to be the collateral damage?

As parents, we're supposed to protect our children. But what can we do when we are forced to offer them up as potential collateral damage?

Under current law, we have little recourse. We're expected to feed our children poison and live with the consequences.

This is not acceptable. We bring our children into the world intending to give them every chance for a great future. We must not stand idly by while corporate-state interests make decisions that will make our dream for them, and their dreams for themselves, impossible.

Big Gas interests claim that "natural" gas is a "clean, domestically produced bridge fuel" to a "sustainable future." But these claims are flagrant lies. Fracking for gas is as dirty or dirtier a process even than coal mining. And the gas that is fracked will go to the highest bidder, not to local communities or even to states in the USA; those high bidders are almost all in Europe and Asia, and the corporations would be working against their own mission (to make as much money as possible) if they were to sell it to us cheap.

But the industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars marketing to the public and lobbying lawmakers. People and legislators believe these lies because they've been repeated over and over. These lies are pitting neighbors against one another, dividing and fracturing (fracking) communities and families.

The industry has essentially forced parents to feed their kids rat poop and glass shards before sending them out to play in traffic with loaded guns. Endangering the welfare of children is a crime throughout the land. Fracking is a crime, and frackers should pay a very high penalty, including jail time, for fracking our children and our communities.

But frackers continue to dupe the public and lobby legislators, and get away with criminal behavior. The industry argument goes like this: You'll get rich if you sign over your mineral rights to us. Those who sign will get rich. Those who do not will suffer untold economic woes.

They are trying to make it a fight between economics and environmentalists. But anyone who has half a brain understands that we all depend on the "environment" to live. We all must be environmentalists -- and not permit anyone to use that as a dirty word. Those who scoff at environmentalists are the criminals.

We all must stand firm and say NO to this destructive industry. NO to corporate power that would use us and our children as lab rats. NO to a government that, in collusion with Big Gas/Big Oil, would keep us enslaved to dirty, finite fossil fuels. NO to fracking. NO to rat poop in the pancakes.

Instead, we must say YES to a sane energy policy. YES to sustainable jobs in a national program of infrastructure rebuilding, energy conservation, and renewable energy projects on the local, state, and national levels. YES to our future. YES to our children's future, and our grandchildren's.

And, good grief, NO poop in the pancakes.

Authors Bio:
An independent journalist, theater artist, educator, activist, and public speaker, Maura Stephens writes and presents most regularly about media, environmental issues, and national and international politics. Her work frequently appears in AlterNet.org and TruthOut.org.

Stephens spent 19 years in mainstream media working her way up the ranks at Newsweek and Newsweek International magazines. Disillusioned with the way journalism was changing, she left to start up an early e-zine and then moved into the non-corporate realm as editor of ICView magazine, the magazine of Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Now associate director of the Park Center for Independent Media, she works with FAIR founder and media watcher Jeff Cohen.

Stephens was founding codirector of Iraqi Refugees Assistance Connection and was the U.S. spokesperson and senior strategist for the International Campaign for Freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma. She also spent many years as an organic farmer, growing almost all of her family's food. When she lived in the city she kept up her passion for growing things at the New York Botanical Garden. There she joined the team that started Bronx Green-Up, a community project that reclaimed abandoned, waste-strewn urban lots and turned them into green oases; BGU became a model for other such urban gardening projects around the country.

Now much of Stephens's energy goes toward fighting the corporate harms of fracking as a cofounder of the Coalition to Protect New York. She is also a member of other grassroots groups fighting to protect people and nature from the devastation wreaked by this relatively new and rampantly invasive practice of the Big Gas industry.

Stephens teaches multimedia journalism and citizen journalism, as well as creative writing, in various venues. She believes in using media and the arts for positive and sustainable social change. She holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from Goddard College and is a three-time graduate of Democracy School.