“There, there,” the Senator soothed, “There, there.”

It was a gorgeous Spring, with warm and balmy breezes soughing through the palm leaves in the new cemetery. A year earlier all the inhabitants of the old cemetery had to be moved to higher ground in this small backwater town near the coast of South Carolina. It was a grisly business, but the old cemetery had been located on a high bluff overlooking the river and over the last 50 years the rising sea level had moved the coast inland almost 25 miles, and the high bluff, once shaded with magnificent ancient live oaks draped in moss was now underwater.

The new cemetery was backed up against the rail yard and along one side the ‘Strom’s Club’ warehouse was struggling to stay in business.

“There, there,” he crooned again. “I’m sure that this innocent child is in God’s arms now.”

This was the third funeral this month, the third time Senator Eddie had to offer comfort to the mother, the third time the Senator had to look into the father’s eye, to see again the look of disbelief.

Nothing killed the child, but there she was, dead and cold. She had, in the words of the doctors, ‘failed to thrive.’ She failed to thrive because her immune system and respiration system and digestive systems would not, could not, find sustenance from food or air. She failed to thrive because she came into the world allergic to everything.

Everything had been said before, there was nothing new to add.

Senator Eddie struggled on. He was trapped and he knew it. He knew who was at fault, he knew how it had happened, he knew that there was nothing he could have done to change the outcome.

Senator Eddie got into this predicament because he was a ‘good man’. There was no more tireless worker in Congress, no person who kept in touch with or did more for his people. There was no one, in his long term in Congress, who brought more jobs and prosperity to the citizens of his state than Senator Eddie.

Agri-business, forest products, trucking, energy and steel – these were the underpinnings of American industry and Senator Eddie was their champion.

Fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide runoff from agri-business and forest products had affected the water, but the University assured people that they were the safest known, and even if a little did seep into the water, it did no measurable harm. And of course the steel business in the state was the benchmark for efficient production, and brought even more jobs to the state when you considered the new roads built to and from the distribution centers, and the almost limitless power available from the cleanest burning coal plants possible and the latest nuclear plants.

But there had been a couple of problems which were becoming harder to ignore. The leachate from the Barnwell nuclear waste storage area had indeed found its way down into the water table and was spreading out in a wedge of poisoned water through the states main aquifer. The smoke plume from the coal fueled power plants did spread east from the mountainous northwestern part of the state, across the whole state.

Twenty years earlier, Senator Eddie was praised for almost single-handedly transforming his mostly poor agricultural and rural sandhill area into becoming an economic showcase, a ‘new prosperity’ zone that brought jobs, jobs and more jobs.

It had been pretty easy, really.

During the late ’00s (pronounced oh, ohs) America had begun to suffer from economic downturn cycles that a muturing country will always go through when expansion starts to fall back in on itself. The country was desperate, the states were desperate and the people were desperate. All the manufacturing jobs were disappearing overseas, and there were just so many white collar jobs left. As business failed one after another they were gong the way of the dodo, too.

What the country needed were ‘new prosperity’ zones, where new business would find a home. Sure there were still the old environmental safeguards in place to protect air and soil and water, but the country was in such dire need that Congress, under the leadership from Senator Eddie’s party, had made it possible to get ‘provisional’ licenses to operate almost everything, including manufacturing and power generation.

The ‘provisional’ provisions allowed business to build and operate on the ‘fast track’ in order to put people back to work, and then commission the University to conduct studies to prove their operations were safe, or at least caused the absolute minimum ill effect, and were following the new ‘best practices’ policy of get the business first, and worry about what to do later, because there was no other choice. It was ‘do business’ and survive another day, or ‘go out of business’ and perish.

After all, the businesses in US were in an undeclared economic war with its once American businesses who had now become international and moved all their manufacturing operations to other countries.

Lately Senator Eddie noticed a pain in his brain, a pain that never completely went away.

How could he admit to himself that everything had been all wrong. Twenty years earlier he had associations with civic leaders and businessmen and politicians, and they were all pulling together. Eddie knew that if business in his state was happy, there would be jobs and his constituency would be happy, too. Later, Eddie moved in higher circles, not so much at the local level any more, and his ‘machine’ managed him and his activities. When a couple of these industrial plants wanted to shut down and move to Malaysia, Eddie was convinced that it was for the stockholder’s good, and that the laid off workers would quickly find employment elsewhere, besides, the corporate home office would remain here.

After the third major plant moved out, idling 4,500 workers, Eddie started to wonder.

Eddie had been only too helpful when negotiating for the plants to come to South Carolina, arm-twisting here and there to get them special exemptions from taxes, and special prices for utilities. Now they had gone, and left their unemployed for the state to figure out what to do with, the loss of revenue from state taxes, and a dirty abandoned factory site. Who was going to clean up the mess they left behind?

Eddie’s headache got worse, and began to throb behind his eyes. Eddie began to stay more and more in his office, and averted his gaze in public.

The phone rang.

“Senator?”, his secretary asked, “can you take this call? It’s from a funeral home in Aiken.”

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