Scores of people who believe that continual exposure to wireless signals have made them ill have begun streaming to a small town in West Virginia where Wi-Fi has been banned.
According to Britain’s Daily Mail, these “Wi-Fi refugees” are making the move to Green Bank, a tiny place located inside the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, established by the FCC in November 1958 to “minimize possible harmful interference to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory” located there, according to the observatory’s website.
Many of those trekking to Green Bank complain of painful symptoms when they are near cell phones or any device with Wi-Fi, two creations that define modern technology. Burning skin, chest pains and acute headaches are among the most common complaints.
Those suffering symptoms, which scientists have labeled “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” (EHS), say that the move to Green Bank has led to a dramatic easing of their condition.
This is part one of a two part transcript that’s over 5000 words.
Rob Kall
In this interview, Chris Hedges talks about the template being used to harvest America– at the expense of the middle class, the sacrifice zones feeling the most pain, and the blood price we’ve paid for the rights they are trying to take away.
Thanks to ON volunteer Don Caldarazzo for help with the transcription process.
Rob Kall: And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), sponsored byOpEdNews.com out of Washington Township, NJ, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, and online of course on iTunes, look for Rob Kall, for this, and other ones.
Tonight my guest is one of my favorite, if not my favorite progressive author, Chris Hedges. He’s got a new book out that he co-authors with Joe Sacco: Days of Destruction-Days of Revolt. Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He is part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He writes a weekly original column, Truthdig. He was written for Harper’s Magazine, the New Statesman, and New York Review of Books.
Rob Kall: Welcome to the show Chris, again.
Chris Hedges: Thank you.
Image by Joe Sacco, from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
Rob Kall: This is a wonderful book that you’ve written. It’s unusual, it’s different, because of the many kind of comic book illustrations by Joe Sacco – that really gets you thinking in seeing the pictures of the destruction that you’ve described in 80% of this book. Most of this book is describing just how America has already fallen into third world status. It’s worse than third-world status, though, and I want you to talk about that, but I want to start with a quote from the book, which you put in the end under the chapter, “Days of Revolt.” You say, “There are no excuses left: either you join the revolt, or you stand on the wrong side of History. You either obstruct through civil disobedience (the only way left to us) the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. You either taste, feel, and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt, or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. You are either a rebel or a slave.”
Let’s start with that. This is how you’re thinking lately?
Chris Hedges: Well, that comes at the end of the book, which is an attempt that both Joe and I made to describe a system that has been seized by political paralysis, and is dominated by [a] narrow corporate elite that no longer responds to the needs of citizens. It attempts to illustrate, by going into the poorest pockets of the country, that the formal mechanisms of power that once made incremental and peaceful reform no longer work, and that the only solution we have is civil disobedience. But that comes after detailing the conditions that people are living, in places like Camden, New Jersey, which per capita is the poorest city in the United States; Pine Ridge, South Dakota has the second poorest county in the country; The average life expectancy for a male on Pine Ridge is 48—that is the lowest in the western hemisphere, outside of Haiti; The coal fields of southern West Virginia; the produce fields where largely undocumented workers, without any kind of legal protection, organizing power or rights, pick the nation’s produce. And by the time you get there, I think, hopefully the reader has seen what happens when individuals in communities are forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. It’s a kind of absurdity, it’s a Utopian ideology, but it’s one that has gripped not only neo-Conservatives, but neo-Liberals, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Scores of people who believe that continual exposure to wireless signals have made them ill have begun streaming to a small town in West Virginia where Wi-Fi has been banned.