Many countries banned lead paint in the 1920s, but the USA promoted lead and assured consumers of its safety with public service announcements and freakish coloring books. And Oliver even suggests that our unwillingness to act on the lead menace may be related to the concentration of lead poisoning in less affluent communities. You see, 20 years ago “Sesame Street” put together a video for children about how to deal with lead in their homes, advising them to wash their hands before they eat and to stay away from peeling paint.
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“There is no safe level of lead”, said John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. “It’s been steadily going down since 2003, and this year, we’ve allocated just $110 million”.
In fact, it’s so unsafe that 20 years ago, “Sesame Street” did a vaguely disturbing song to teach kids about the evils of lead paint.
The host played a clip of an activist explaining that lead paint is often a far greater problem than lead in water.
Thus, the way to convince Congress that lead poisoning is an issue worth funding is perhaps best encapsulated in S, which ran a campaign on the dangers of lead in the ’90s. “Even low-level exposure can lead to irreversible damage, like lower IQs, antisocial behavior, and reduced attention span”, Oliver noted.
“You just have to have a vested interest in the outcome, and you’ll be amazed what you can do”, Oliver says, before launching into a verse of song with the Sesame Street characters who have joined him to help raise the kind of money not found in Elmo’s piggy bank. “That is just a little more than Americans spent on Ride Along 2, a movie which, incidentally, the NY Post described as ‘as amusing as lead poisoning'”.
At one point the government estimated that the cost of removing all the lead in American homes would cost $16.6 billion every year from 2001 to 2010.
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Oliver cut to footage of outraged legislators – before revealing that those same legislators voted to slash lead abatement funding. “And since we very much still have this problem, it’s clearly time to address it again”.
