Don’t Forget the People of East Palestine

Eleanor Goldfield: East Palestine, Ohio, is still, and will be for decades to come, poisoned, cast aside and forgotten, both by their elected officials and the corporate media who parrot those lies and empty promises. When corporate media did cover East Palestine, it was extractive and shallow. It was disinterested in the root causes or legitimate solutions, totally disinterested in the people, very ready to sacrifice them for the cause of a byline. The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent, it’s the absence of news. Max and Steve represent the presence of that news, the Real News, if you will, in their collaborative work, the short documentary ​“Train Wreck in ​‘Trump Country’: Partisan Politics Hasn’t Helped East Palestine, OH.”

Maximillian Alvarez is the editor in chief at The Real News Network, and Steve Mellon is a photo journalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but has been reporting without pay for the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the alternative newspaper that Post-Gazette workers have been producing on their own while they’ve been on strike for the last two years.

The kind of reporting that Steve and Max have done is not only an act of powerful independent journalism, it is an act of community organizing. It is an act of building beyond the borders that we are told and programmed to believe in and respect. It is reporting that refuses to forget. It refuses to accept the trauma porn 24 hour news cycle. This is the kind of work that journalists of, for and by the people do. It is an honor for me to bestow this award to Maximillian Alvarez and Steve Mellon.

Maximillian Alvarez: From the bottom of my heart, thank you. And on behalf of The Real News Network and our entire team of grassroots journalists and movement media makers, I am beyond grateful and humbled to accept this prestigious award.

Most especially, I want to thank the people of East Palestine for opening your hearts and homes to me, to Steve and filmmaker Mike Balonek, and for trusting us to share your stories with the world. We will not forget about you, and we won’t stop reporting until you get justice. And I can assure you all here that we are a long, long way off from that.

I have to take this opportunity to reiterate the same plea I’ve been making for two years now. Please don’t forget about East Palestine. Don’t look away. Don’t give up on these people, as so many politicians and pundits and unaffected members of the public have. They are working people just like you and me. They are our neighbors, and their lives and community will never be what they were before February, 3, 2023. So please, I beg you, help them. Share their stories everywhere you can. Hold their poisoners accountable for their crimes. Use your voice to advance residents’ demands that a federal disaster declaration be issued for East Palestine, which neither the Trump nor the Biden administration has done. Break the cages in your hearts and on your eyes that keep you from seeing the human beings behind these headlines and how much more we have in common with each other than corporate media and corporate politicians would have us believe. This is not a red state or blue state problem. This is a working class problem.

As veteran railroad worker Matt Weaver told me after the East Palestine derailment, these trains loaded with toxic materials are blasting past our houses and our kids’ T-ball games. They are not passing through the gated communities of the rich. 

This shit is happening all over the place, and this is what is in store for most of us if the corporate monsters poisoning our communities are not stopped. It’s going to have to be us, the ones in the path of all this reckless and preventable destruction, working people fighting as one, who are going to stop them. If we don’t, our future will look a lot like East Palestine looks today.

Now what I’ve also learned doing this reporting, is that reporting in the traditional sense is not enough to get us there. Our conceit as journalists is that our ultimate job is to inform the uninformed. But the great crisis we face is not a population lacking in available information, but a population immobilized by too much information and lacking in power to do something with it to change the outcome. And that doesn’t just mean telling stories differently to rouse people out of apathy and providing answers in our reporting to the question, ​“What can I do to help it?” It is that, but it also means going further and actually using ourselves and our platforms to connect people who weren’t connected before. That’s how this documentary came to be. I connected with Steve through my podcast reporting on his strike. He connected me to folks in East Palestine who he reported on, and then we went down there together, and it kept snowballing.

I also interviewed railroad workers and East Palestine residents together, and I said, ​“Why aren’t you guys talking to each other? You’re fighting the same company.” And then they started talking to each other and organizing. We got people from different sacrifice zones on the same panels, in the same spaces. In East Palestine, South Baltimore, West Virginia, we are bringing people together using our connections and our place as journalists who are well placed to facilitate those connections. This is what I think doing more means. It means collaborating with each other so we can carry out our missions in the most impactful ways and better serve and empower the public.

Steve Mellon: Two months ago, I went to a community meeting just outside of East Palestine. But a woman I did not know plopped down beside me in the empty seat, and she looked really weary. I looked at her and I said, ​“Are you all right?” And she said, ​“No.” She said, ​“I’m not all right.” Her kids were ill. She was stressed out. She felt her town had been ruined, poisoned. She told me she felt like she was having a heart attack every minute of every day. Thus began a series of long one on one conversations.

The young woman is Morgan Parker. She’s 38. She wanted people to know her story. For two decades, she struggled with opioid addiction. She had been abused as a child. In 2021, she experienced her own harrowing overdose, and she survived. She got clean and went into long term recovery. She got a job. Her kids were living with her. She had a home. Then on the night of February 3, 2023, a train derailed and caught fire half a mile from her home. She looked out her bedroom window and the flames, she said, were insane. They were 100 feet high. She said it looked like the whole town was on fire. A number of cars on that train contained highly toxic chemicals. That disaster upended the lives of thousands, including Morgan and her kids. Morgan and her family were evacuated twice. They would not return home for months. Morgan’s kids struggled in school. She was dealing with a difficult commute to work. She had her own health issues. She was stressed out. She lost her job.

Now, the Pittsburgh Union Progress published Morgan’s story three weeks ago, and she received an outpouring of support from the community. Others have come forward to share with her their stories of abuse and addiction, and of trying to hold their lives together after the derailment, there’s a community forming.

Morgan’s story followed the story of Tom Lewis. On February 7 of 2023, a black cloud from a chemical fire down at the derailment site descended on his property. The fruit from his apple trees turned black the next season. Tom had trouble breathing. Now he needs oxygen to walk to his mailbox. Christine Sislos story preceded Tom’s. Before that, there was Matt McAnlis, Ashley McCollum, R.J. Kissick, Lonnie Miller, Nathan Velez. I could go on and on, folks, these are working class people who lived complex and extraordinary lives of joy, struggle, love and pain, and then came a train derailment. The derailment was the result of carelessness by a billion dollar company, Norfolk Southern, which owned the train, and they have since moved on. Morgan and Tom and thousands of others remain to deal with all of the unknowns that follow chemical exposure. These are people who demand to be heard. They feel the world has moved on and forgotten about them.

This episode of the Working People Podcast was originally published on August 8.