A Healthy Baby Girl and Blue Vinyl

Having just watched A Healthy Baby Girl, I feel touched on a personal level by Judith Helfand's story. On one hand, she shows a huge manner of staying strong despite the personal crisis (which she even refuses to refer to as such). She does not focus on the disease itself, but rather its byproducts. For instance, she often talks about several problematic consequences on human interactions and relationships - particularly between mother-child figures (including both Judith and her mother and Judith and her potential children). On the other hand, the obvious great shock, pain and grief after the loss she suffered due to DES adds passion to her political activism. Both elements of her life - pain and eagerness to act - spread onto her family.

In the case of Blue Vinyl - since it is primarily Helfand's and not her parents' cause - it takes a lot of time and effort on her part to affect her parents and make them care. The difference between the two movies shows how for most of individuals, as long as they are not personally touched or bothered by a larger/national or global problem, they need specific evidence and a good reason to turn it into their cause. The same is currently necessary for the environmentalism to gain on its importance. If the need to care about environment was translated into a personal language of a community, it would spread faster and among many more of its members. Such a phenomena was visible in our experience with the women from Waltham School. Clearly, there was a hierarchy of arguments one could come up with in order to convince them about a higher value in healthy/natural cleaning products rather than popular chemical-based ones. For instance, mentioning effects on their health and the health of their children, as well as differences in prices, met with a bigger openness to new idea of healthy products than talking about general scientific study.

Blue Vinyl and A Healthy Baby Girl show how personalizing an issue seems as one of fantastic methods to make someone care, to make them act, and stand for a change.