All for one | How moms became a political force – By Mya Jaradat (Deseret News) / Mar 13, 2023
Cherri Foytlin didn’t set out to become an activist. She is a mother of six, married to a man who worked on an oil rig in south Louisiana while she worked at a small-town paper, writing features about things like who grew the biggest cauliflower that year.
But when the BP oil spill happened in 2010, killing 11 and releasing almost four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP invited Foytlin, like all of the state’s press, to go out on a tour of the disaster.
“It was a little show for us,” she recalls. BP took her and the other journalists out on boats and then-Gov. Bobby Jindal came to speak to the press. “I wanted to talk to somebody who’s a fisherman or a person that has to clean up.”
So she went back later on her own. After tooling around a bit, she finally convinced a “big Cajun fisherman” to take her out on his boat, along with the man’s five-year-old son. As they idled through the blob of oil, the father cried. He’d lost his livelihood; his ability to take care of his family.
CONTINUE > https://www.deseret.com/2023/2/27/23591587/motherhood-political-activism
