One of the earliest joys of the Internet in the 1990s was the new-found ability to uncover just how closely connected we all are with others. We previously had no easy way of knowing that stuff. Six degrees of separation were all that separated each of us from presidents, actors, athletes, billionaires and beauty queens.
Alternatively, we found out we were not all that far removed from some pretty nasty characters as well.
We cross paths with new people all the time, online and off, and one of my occasional preoccupations is to wonder how closely we may have been to meeting each other sometime in the past, but didn’t.
Perhaps we passed within a block of each other in some random city years ago -- one of us going one direction, one in another.
We just missed.
The opposite is also true. We may meet someone in some consequential way that sticks in our memory but never encounter them again. We didn’t get to know them, really and we never will. But that one meeting mattered,
This kind of thing has happened to me many, many times, both with famous people and strangers. For example, I’ve met Jesse Jackson twice. Both times I just happened to be standing in a crowd when he walked up and shook my hand. Other than that, we’ve never spoken and I’m quite sure he has no idea who I am.
Other random encounters happened when I was traveling, especially overseas.
Often, one of these one-timers pops up in the news and remind me of when we encountered each other over decades ago.
An example currently in the Senate, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, was a 40ish chair of a House agricultural committee when he questioned a 30ish journalist rather harshly half a lifetime ago.
He had an untamed Midwestern twang and probably assumed the reporter was some city slicker from San Francisco who cared only about the environmental issue he termed the "Circle of Poison," and didn’t care about the plight of farmers like those in Grassley’s district.
They sparred over pesticides but the Congressman seemed shocked when the journalist described his deep concern for the small farmers who were among the primary victims of the multinational agrochemical companies he'd exposed in his book.
That was many years ago now, probably forty. I doubt Grassley even remembers the encounter or knew that the city slicker he met that day was the son of a man who grew up on a very small farm in Canada.
***
A decade after I appeared before Grassley’s committee, the most significant legislative attempt to date to address the issues I testified about was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy and it was called “Circle of Poison Prevention Act."
It would have “prohibited the export of pesticides that were not registered for domestic use; were not registered for food use and would not be exported for use on food; or had had the majority of registration canceled.”
The legislation was co-sponsored in the House by Leon Panetta, but it died in committee.
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