I often wonder if in seventy years we will have classrooms of students grilling teachers as to why their grandparents and great grandparents – you and me – weren’t more concerned about toxic contamination and the immune system. Didn’t we see what we were doing to ourselves, to our foods and water, to future generations? Didn’t we grasp the connection between the environment and skyrocketing rates of diseases in which the immune system runs amok?
On the other hand, perhaps in the future we will all have made enough educated choices, exercising cumulative veto power as consumers and demanding accountability from
government officials and agencies, that that roomful of high school students won’t be pressing teachers as to why we didn’t foresee the polluted, disease-laden legacy we were leaving behind. Rather, they’ll be asking how a generation of scientists, researchers, patients and concerned parents were prescient enough to come together to stop an autoimmune epidemic in its tracks. There can’t be a better legacy – to leave our children than that.
