REV. BILLY TALEN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Courtesy of Rev. Billy Talen)Last summer, in Prospect Park near our Brooklyn home – two park workers sprayed a fire hydrant near a playground where our daughter Lena climbs monkey-bars for hours on end. I walked up to the truck and saw Monsanto boxes ripped open in the back of their pickup. One of the workers was pouring RoundUp into a white plastic barrel. That was the one who talked to me. His voice had a raw, low sound like he was saying confession. He began to recite a list of the organic herbicides that he wished he was using but wasn't.

The nano-commons around and within our bodies and our children's bodies is a dumping ground for corporate poison. Some of us are vaguely aware of this molecular-level world. We have read a few summary sentences at the top studies that link Monsanto's RoundUp to non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and other cancers, endocrine and immunity disruptions and birth defects.

The pollution that we cannot touch, see or smell does show itself this way: illness in ever-younger victims. We have found from our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed with dozens of cities and towns – that the location of spraying is frequently near ball-fields, schools and park playground. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to glyphosates and the "inert" chemicals in the RoundUp mix, which help the toxin bind to target plants. Target plants!

The Glyphosates of Monsanto are banned throughout much of the world, like Bayer's Neonicotinoids. The mass-killing of beloved honeybees and songbirds by that powerful neuropath, a more lethal version of nicotine – has aroused a nightmare in the public mind. And now here comes Neonicotinoid and Glyphosate, the Big Merger. The communities that make these two famous toxins are joining up, the older company buying the newer one, in the biggest cash buy-out in history. Bernie Sanders called the merger, "A marriage made in Hell."

Both companies are known to believe in their own marketing with the tenacity of a fundamentalist religion. We've watched them stay on message facing scores of scientists who have the carcinogenic stats in their hands (I speak of the Euro attempt by Monsanto to renew its glyphosate license for 15 years). Bayer and Monsanto have the same taste in messaging graphics. On their websites you see a penchant for flowery meadows, black children and soft-focus dawns.

Monsanto is staying on message in the extreme: it wants to change our memory of Agent Orange. Bayer is staying on a message, and you have to hand it to them. How do you keep denying that you mixed the chemicals at Auschwitz? Bayer CEO Fritz der Meer, sentenced at the Nurenberg trials to 7 years in prison for his work in developing the poison gas Zyklon B, was freed in the 50's, dry-cleaned his suit, and took back the presidency of the company. One of his legacies is the Bayer "CropScience" division, the Fatherland of GMO/toxin-drenched crops – so the poison comes forward to the present day.

Monsanto is known as the most hated corporation in the world. But then, Bayer has also vied for that title. Now Monsanto is trying to disappear into Bayer in the way that Union Carbide disappeared into Dow Chemical after the Bhopal gas disaster. Monsanto will try to lose its logo, which is, unbelievably, a leafy twig.

Here is a company in deep trouble. Google the word "Glyphosate" and you find circling blood-maddened lawyers. The company that sued a farmer every three weeks for seventeen years is sinking into its own had-it-coming death. Bayer had the cash and made the offer – and what do they see in it for them? I decided to look at their faces. Fritz der Meer looks like the Florida serial murderer Ted Bundy. The current CEO's of Bayer, the incoming (Marijn Dekkers) and outgoing (Werner Baumann) are both absolutely angelic. They look like choir boys, like scrubbed-clean submissives. This must be sophisticated messaging, too. I don't get it.

Where does this leave us? What is our political action after this Orwellian merger goes through, along with the mergers of Dow and DuPont, ChemChina and Syngenta? The seven sisters of Big Chem will go from seven to four. The material reality of our breathing, eating, birthing and dying – is under a new management that could fit at your average board room table.

As of now, our approach to the murderous behavior of this handful of men remains stuck. We hate them we say, but we haven't really made a move to take the poisons from our own bodies, or from the air and water and soil that partners with our bodies. This part of the Earth's crisis, call it "pollution" has a depressingly slow motion response from those of us who are responsible, much like the other facets of this apocalypse: "climate change," "population," "species extinction and habitat destruction."

One explanation for our passivity in the face of obvious poisoning is that our consumer era is hyper-visual. The chemicals that the corporations hide in plain sight are not felt by us, not sensed by us. Even if we say that we believe the Glyphosates are in the park and coming into our bodies. Do we really believe it? Not enough, apparently, to risk arrest to defend ourselves.

But the natural scientists are now telling us what First Nations people have always said: the powers of the Earth are largely beyond our naked eye, Much of the honeybee's magical navigation (that the neonics short-circuit) is in the world of quantum mechanics. It is invisible, first, and second – we wouldn't understand it if we could see it. And yet the politics that we will need to end profiteering toxins will require that we have a new relationship with the unseeable. The Earth is there too, beyond our eye, and the Earth is not a victim of these two groups of homo sapiens, Bayer and Monsanto.

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Rev. Billy Talen is spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping. The group uses aggressive FOIAs to force parks depts. and school systems to surrender their records of spraying Monsanto's RoundUp with its toxin Glyphosate.

The "church" is developing its US Map of Poisoned Parks and Playgrounds, available at Revbilly.com/maps, as a resource for local activists who want to clean up their parks and schools. The maps have been used in congressional hearings to demonstrate the saturation of the toxins. The maps will be used Oct 18 – 21 at the EPA for public testimony on the agency's Glyphosate review.

The Stop Shopping Choir and Reverend Billy are activists who stage musical shows, called "Fabulous Worships." They open their holiday run at Joe's Pub at the New York's Public Theater on Nov. 20. Talen is author of "The Earth Wants YOU" from City Lights Books.