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Steven Katiyo-Correspondent
On February 3, a train in the United States town of East Palestine in Ohio carrying chemicals derailed and exploded.
The smoke cloud was huge and could be seen from miles.
The environmental damage caused by the spill has been extensive, polluting the wider Ohio River basin area and killing thousands of fish and farm animals.
The Washington Post and other news outlets have reported that the derailed tanker cars were carrying vinyl chloride, a hazardous, odourless chemical that is mostly used in the United States in the manufacturing of plastics.
According to the National Cancer Institute, people exposed to this component can suffer from several types of this disease, such as liver, brain or lung cancer, as well as lymphoma and leukaemia.
When this chemical burns, it releases hydrogen chloride and phosgene, which was used as a lethal weapon in the First World War.
Despite this, authorities have been quite relaxed about its outcome.
Even though officials, including Governor Mike DeWine, have assured the residents that air quality in the town is safe, confusion and distrust still remain among local residents who have complained about headaches, nausea and finding their cars covered in soot, their homes filled with overpowering odours and their pets falling ill or dying.
However, the accident did not attract widespread attention from the US mainstream media until 10 days after the accident, and a reporter was arrested for reporting on the incident.
It has now become a trending topic on Twitter. More and more people are realising that this is “a terrible environmental disaster,” and some media have even called it “the Ohio version of Chernobyl.”
While the crisis in Ohio was fermenting, all the US media and politicians were busy hyping up the unintended entry of a stray Chinese civilian unmanned airship into US airspace, which is an entirely unexpected, isolated event caused by force majeure.
Washington’s melodramatic reaction has made a big splash inside the United States and startled many around the world.
Despite that Beijing has repeatedly clarified the incident and expressed its regret, the US government and some American media outlets still went on a “spy balloon” narrative, and the Pentagon shot down the balloon.
Last Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that China was to shift attention from the balloon incident, and criticised China for its “irresponsible” move.
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, “Speaking of “shift attention,” can the US tell us why it is able to see the “balloon” 18 000 meters in the sky, but seems to have been blind to the toxic mushroom cloud of vinyl chloride over Ohio?”
The contrast is extremely stark: almost all Washington elites are staring at a few “UFOs” at an altitude of more than 18 000 metres and talking about “security threats,” but they turn a blind eye to the real security threats — the poisonous gas that their people are facing.
It is questionable if the US government is deliberately hyping the balloon stories to divert people’s attention from the real catastrophe. Some netizens have even quipped that the best way to get the government’s attention is to put a “Made in China” label on the derailed train.
The US, deeply poisoned by bipartisan struggles and too obsessed with fighting with “imaginary outside enemies,” has in recent years been investing more resources and money into the broad national security field, whilst neglecting its domestic problems.
This highlights the serious disconnect between Washington’s security philosophy and reality. The derailment in Ohio was accidental, but inevitable.
According to data from the US Federal Railroad Administration, in the past 10 years, there have been an average of 3.4 train derailment accidents per day in the US, and crude oil and chemicals have frequently leaked and exploded due to train derailments.
This shows that there are serious loopholes in the infrastructure construction and transportation management of dangerous goods in the US, and the safety of a large number of American residents is thus threatened.
This is also a sign of the lack of governance within the US. However, Congress, as the representative of American democracy, rarely conducts investigations and accountability for these things. Instead, it has a lot of bills targeting China.
Even the latest trillion-dollar infrastructure bill introduced by the Biden administration is aimed at “competing with China.”
The Ohio incident is bound to peter out public support for the administration.
It has become more and more clear to the public that the US government and current system is unable to solve their sufferings and dilemma, as the two parties are too involved in bipartisan struggles; and engaging the country in hegemony against other countries, so they turn a deaf ear to people’s demands.
What US political elites and the general public want are totally different things.
The US government has a number of specialised functional departments, each of which is supposed to have its own job, but now they seem to be encapsulated in the same cage called “national security.”
It has spared no effort to “prevent threats.” Shooting down balloons seems to be very hilarious and refreshing, but will the polluted air get better? Have the soil and water been disinfected? No matter how ideologically paranoid Americans are, they also know that hyping the “China threat theory” cannot solve the real security problems facing the American people.
This creates an irony that while the US calls for human rights, democracy and freedom in China and in the world, they have little appetite in taking the concerns of their own people seriously, this raises in question the actual effectiveness and nature of American democracy, whereby the government can harm its own people with absolute impunity.
Whether the US government is able to properly address local residents’ concerns and secure their safety is a test of its governance capacity. For the safety and interests of the American people, and for the development of the US economy and society, US politicians should adopt a more responsible attitude to properly deal with the real security threats domestically, and have courage to cure the chronic affliction of inefficiency.
The disaster in Ohio is a reminder that the threat to America is not external, but internal.
When “national security” overshadows the operation mechanism of the whole state power, the safety limit of the public is repeatedly lowered.
The incident also serves as a wake-up call to the US political elite: it is their duty to focus on internal governance, which is also the right way to build a better America. If the security concept is not on the right track, its domestic security problems will continue to erupt.
Online Reporter