Re: perception and reality

[BLHamrick@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 08/14/2002 3:24:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time, LGrimm@FACNET.UCLA.EDU writes:





> Countering false beliefs is a never ending battle. It is tough, takes commitment and you must have patience when your efforts do not work right away. 
>
>
> PS: It is nigh on impossible to correct the anti-nuclear bias "hit" that all the people reading the article got. You can only hope that this guy's future writings will counter this hit today. 






I'd just like to add my support to this.  So many of us, I know, have tried to counter the misinformation in the press, and circulating through sundry legistures this year, but we really need a full court press to have any effect.  Remember, politicians and the media are, for the most part, not particularly interested in the science of the matter (dare not try to wield any math, or you can tuck them in and kiss them goodnight).  We need to be simple, concise, vigilant, and persistent to hope to have any effect at all.


I know we all have actual work to do, but the hard-core activists apparently don't.  I have come to believe over the last seven months, it is their job, on a day to day basis, to simply distort the facts, hoping to turn (or keep) the tide of public opinion against the hard, albeit tedious, evidence, and gather a lot of uneducated money together in the process.  So, even if you didn't sign up for it, if you have the tools it takes, you're enlisted in the battle to maintain some semblance of sanity in our regulatory framework.  


And, to those of you in California, who may know me, I want to make it very, very clear that I am not advocating any particular position on any particular legislation.  I am speaking solely on behalf of myself, and simply advocating that people with the appropriate education and experience speak out on matters of great public importance, rather than assume someone else is taking care of it.  They aren't.  Whatever your individual opinions might be, let them be known, lest we find our legislators have legislated us back to the days when the earth was flat, and cats were familiars, responsible for the plague.


Barbara