Kaitlyn Weston- chapter eight

In chapter eight there were a couple of things that came to my attention.  One thing that I found is that it seems more like Iversen is talking to us instead of just writing a memoir.  She states “And it’s still there, the lingering feeling that this chapter wasn’t supposed to be part of my story, or my family’s story, or anyone’s story.  Governments aren’t supposed to poison their own people.  We weren’t supposed to know about Rocky Flats during the production years, and now we are supposed to forget it ever existed” (Iversen 301).  She is pointing out how her story wasn’t finished until after everything had happened.  She worked on this memoir for basically most of her life and she can’t really control what went into her book; she was just simply stating the facts.  This seemed very interesting to me because now I feel more connected to her as a reader.  She isn’t just writing a memoir for us… she’s telling a story to us.
“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” (Iversen 300).  This is a statement that plenty of people have heard and I’ve always been told that by my parents, but I never thought that it could apply to this book.  I had to think really hard about how this related to the book.  All of the hating against Rocky Flats is what stood out to me.  If you can’t say anything nice about the nuclear weapons plant that you’re growing up next to, then don’t say anything at all… oddly enough, that’s what they all did.  They kept their mouths shut and didn’t speak about it!  They wouldn’t care about the harm being done because they didn’t know there was harm being done.  Why?  Because no one talked about what actually happened there so no one knew how horrible it was. 
Something like this just kind of blew my mind.