We will not give up

This post from Blue Mass Group perfectly express our sentiments. We will never stop fighting.

Blue Mass Group - Weymouth residents refuse to count their own lives as cheap (link)

Excerpt: “Weymouth resident Doug Smock has written a truly remarkable letter to the Patriot-Ledger regarding the Weymouth gas compressor, now under construction. It’s historically informed, eloquent, and humane — plain old good writing, and I encourage everyone to click through and read it in full. Smock is a former resident of Pittsburgh, and links the devastation wrought by the steel industry there to what’s happening here.

I visited the site one morning last month, slapped on a No Compressor sticker, and joined, albeit weakly, the fight. I live about a mile away. I moved to North Weymouth just seven years ago, but I grew up in the Monongahela Valley southeast of Pittsburgh, an area where coke ovens belched toxic fumes with no pollution controls into densely populated neighborhoods that are now even more blighted than the Fore River shipyard. These are the neighborhoods that won the world wars, but are now discarded waste like the Chernobyl zone. The morning I visited the compressor site, people walked up to tell me their touching and tragic stories. And they made it clear they will never give up.

… What’s happening in The Fore River basin is worth noting for a couple reasons. For one, it’s interesting how this town has changed—just like the towns in the Mon Valley around Pittsburgh, and other towns like it all over America. We’ve had enough. You walked all over us while protecting towns where the executives of companies like Enbridge and Bethlehem Steel live. For another, the compressor station is one last outrageous symptom of North America’s no longer tenable love affair with fossil fuels. Massachusetts utilities don’t even need, nor want, this gas. Boston used to be the end of the pipeline. Now it’s being extended to who knows where.

If people around the country aren’t rooting for us to win this battle, they should be.

The Patriot-Ledger also recently profiled Weymouth resident Lisa Jennings, one of the first people arrested at the construction site. This is literally a fight for her life.

She sits back down. “What do you do next?” she says. Her life is a juggling act of caring for her adult daughter, advocating for people with disabilities and, these days, fighting construction of a new natural gas compressor station not far from her house. It’s all advocacy. It is — and isn’t — a full-time job.

“I don’t know. That’s why I got arrested,” she says. “I don’t know what to do next.”

… “At base I’m just a mom trying to make a decision for our health,” Jennings said. “How do I stop it?”

The emotional strain is real, and soaks into every moment of being.” (Blue Mass Group)