Tell the Senate NO on RFK, Jr.
Olivia Dahl, age 7, daughter of the great children's book author, died from measles. It didn't have to happen.
Author Roald Dahl on the death of his beloved daughter Olivia:
"Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.
'I feel all sleepy,' she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was...in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.
...I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books.
And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children."
Roald Dahl, 1986
I remember my parents' terror when polio hit Ann Arbor, Michigan where we were living. There were three of us under the age of three. Apparently my parents bundled us all up, and bought (back then, extremely expensive) air tickets for us children and my mother to fly to Arlington, VA where my mother's parents lived. I was a year old. People knew that polio could be a death sentence. It could also leave a child crippled for life, or, in the case of Helen Keller, blind and deaf. rfkj is a MONSTER. I'll spend the rest of the day phoning the repugnicant senators -- wonder if anyone will even take my message, since I'm not a constituent. What infuriates me about that is that there are TWO Senators for 800,000 people in N. Dakota, i.e., one Senator per 400,000 N. Dakotans; There are TWO Senators for 40,000,000 people in California, i.e., one Senator for 20,000,000 Californians. HOW CAN THIS BE ALLOWED??! AND HOW CAN WE STOP THIS FROM CONTINUING?!!
In my 20's I stopped by a cemetary in Vermont & saw Robert Frost's grave. His gravestone was surrounded by many small stones representing children of his who died in the first years of their lives. The graveyard had many family histories represented in this way. We need modern medicine. Is it perfect? Of course not. Modern medicine (and research funded by the government) is the better alternative. I pray that my granddaughter's generation remains free from measles, polio, whopping cough, tetanus and the like.