National Newspaper Week, Oct. 4–10, is an opportunity to focus attention on something Long Islanders experience every day but can easily take for granted: the value of having journalists paying attention to your own community.
Thousands of water suppliers across the United States, including the Suffolk County Water Authority, have filed lawsuits against companies involved with PFAS. Last year the 3M Company agreed to a settlement of $10.3 billion. SCWA expects to receive $170 million of that. It got an initial payment of $34 million last year.
But being innocent doesn’t prevent the government from suspecting you of wrongdoing, or even arresting you. The government may target people not because they have committed a crime, but to make examples of them, intimidate others, or silence those they regard as troublesome or subversive.
Recently I’ve come to believe that the strongest influence on developing human beings is the times in which they live. Try as I might, summoning all the empathy I possess, I simply can’t know what it was like to endure the London Blitz during World War II. Or the Dust Bowl in America, or the Holocaust, all of which changed the way people lived and thought.