Why Jeff Became an Activist:

Back in the 1980's I cut my teeth working on aquifer protection issues in Nassau County on Long Island. I worked with a community group whose purpose was to preserve the aquifers that provided Long Island's 3 million residents with clean drinking water. Those aquifers were quickly becoming polluted with chemicals used decades earlier on the potato fields that became housing developments and, through over-pumping, salt water from both the ocean and Long Island sound was beginning to show up in municipal wells. At the same time, the sewering of much of Nassau County lowered the water table pushing pollutants even further into the aquifers. Some residents in the western portion of Nassau county were drinking brown muck while others were seeing their wells run dry or brackish. In Suffolk county, developers were rapidly paving over the pine barrens - a vast recharge area that should have been preserved - in their entirety - for the future.

There was a single remaining 4 acre Nassau county-owned parcel at the top of the glacial moraine we wanted to see preserved as a water recharge area for the underlying aquifers, an admittedly meager attempt at some sort of contract with the future. So, Rose Eisner, the organization's director who was some 30 years my senior, and I, went to see Nassau County Executive Francis Purcell to ask him to set those acres aside. Mr. Purcell had insisted that the county was going to sell those acres for development and that he needed the money to help balance the county's multi-hundred million dollar budget that, somehow, the $50,000 earned from their sale would make a difference.

During the meeting Mr. Purcell turned to Ms Eisner and said, 'Rose, why are you worrying about this now? By the time there's a problem we'll both be long gone.'

I asked Mr. Purcell, 'But, what about the future?' To which he replied, 'You young people always come up with better solutions'.
I was stunned: here's a man, elected to the highest position of authority in the county and backed by the nations' most powerful political machine telling me that this wasn't his problem - but that is was mine and my generation's and that he had no intention of thinking about the future - only about the immediate present.

It was at that meeting I decided that when we run into problems we should fix them then and there and as best we can. That it's inherently wrong to place the responsibility for our mistakes, and the mistakes of our fathers, onto future generations and that doing so imperils not only our credibility but makes those future generations realize that their elders don't care. The apathy endemic in our society today is emblematic of that very problem and we are all to blame.

Mr. Purcell didn't seem to care. Politicians all too often do not care today and those who do not need to be exposed and removed from office. Once a strip mall is built or a housing development covers prime water recharge areas they are not likely to be removed and the land reclaimed to its best purpose. The next generation cannot possibly afford to resolve that problem and so are left with a lesser quality of life - our sad, pathetic gift to them.
The problem now, all these years later, is that the mind-set still persists: don't worry about the future, worry only about the next election cycle, the next fiscal budget, the next campaign and let the next generation resolve the problems we're going to gift them with - even after we muck things up so badly that repair and resolution will be vastly expensive - if not downright impossible.

I implore you all - solve our problems today, make the sacrifices today, expend the costs today and gift the next generation with a future that is better, brighter and more secure - and with the bills paid.

Let the epitaphs on our gravestones read: "We Did The Best We Could", rather than the all-too-common, "Sorry guys, we didn't give a shit about you." For in the end the latter has been all too true for too long and it's our responsibility to change that. If we don't, we fail as a generation and the 20something-year-old kids that make up today's "Generation Sucks" will be right - everything sucks.

If we screw up they'll be absolutely within their rights to despise our memory. Is that really what we want?

JmG