Preface
“Early Sunday morning, June 4, 2017, I was sicker than I had ever been before.
Too sick to even bend over, as I vomited all over the toilet, myself, and the bathroom floor— and I didn’t even care.
The previous afternoon, when I was outside mowing the lawn, a high-clearance agricultural boom sprayer sped towards me from an adjoining field and sprayed me with a cloud of a toxic herbicide.”
This issue is unresolved; and so are all the other issues and incidents presented in this book. The complete lack of any meaningful or substantive action on the part of authorities in Tompkins County and New York State was a driving force behind continued efforts to publish this book and get a positive resolution for the county’s marginalized rural community.
My “closure” in writing these narratives was not the bureaucratic closing of a file; but the act of keeping those files open and exposed to public view — and, hopefully, public pressure.
The circumstantial nature of these accusations is greatly strengthened by a singular lack of any contradictory evidence. Every incident I was able find has the same “earmarks” and points in the same direction. The sole basis for selection was the amount of documentation available through public records and my personal involvement.
Any effective circumstantial case depends on the number of facts that support a single conclusion: I have sometimes sacrificed readability in an effort to present those facts. This is not a Detective Story, it’s not a “who-done-it”; it’s a “what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it?”
In our government’s “vision” of society; there seems to be no room for public participation, approval, or oversight of its actions — we need to replace that vision, and that power, with ours.
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Everyone I talk to in the rural community thinks that Tompkins County government is corrupt and biased, although many are afraid to speak out in public. There are those who believe that my herbicide spraying was in retaliation for my advocacy of Rural Social Justice.
Urban Colonialism, like other colonial arguments, takes on a much darker form when its “greater good” rhetoric turns to on the ground boot heels in rural towns and villages.
This book exposes only a part, but a part is enough to begin with. The rest is just the same — and it stretches farther than you would believe.
