One of the things that helps me write this column is reading what the other guys have to say. So, a couple of times a week, I will get into Red State or Daily Events or even a couple of a the gun lovers blogs that attempt to come up with logical reasons why assholes with the mental capacity of smog, should be armed to the teeth. I‘ve even been known, when trapped in the car, to listen to Rush, but one can only really take Rush for a few minutes at a time. Long exposure to him has been proven to rot the brain.
Of course these Right wing clarions exist on advertising as opposed to Left wing chronicles like Reader Supported News and National Change, which, don’t take any advertising and thereby manage to maintain some smidgen of integrity.
So it was, that I was browsing through a column n Daily Events, by a guy named John Hayward, who signs in as a little to the right of Ted Cruz.. Hayward, it seems is very upset that John Kerry is trying to solve the civil war in Syria without invading the country. Mr. Hayward is obviously gunbuddies with John McCain and both would love to see troops on the ground again. Maybe they should each grab a rifle and run over there.
But it isn’t just Secretary of State Kerry that draws Hayward’s ire. He is reserving a special place in his heart for all those who have made environmentalism into, as he puts it, a government religion. No don’t try to figure that out because it doesn’t, like most of what Hayward says, make any sense at all.
He attacks all who would try to solve global warming as members of an anti-scientific religion. An interesting concept coming from a man with a reader base that tends to believe that somebody actually built a boat and took two of each species for a cruise.
Hayward keeps going back to the church of the environment, an interesting obsession since most of us think of the left as being more or less Godless and the right, of which Hayward is somewhat of a pillar, as God mongers and church creators.
The Right has decided that Global Warming is just something the Commie bastards of the Left have made up so they have a reason to oppose everything the Right wants to have happen. What they are not smart enough to discern is that global warming is only the long range part of a much more serious problem whose short range problem is killing people with the air they breathe and the water they drink. I am, of course, speaking of the more immediate problem of environmental destruction, made possible by the same causes as that of global warming.
There is really no reason for anyone to get their panties in a bunch about global warming because if we don’t solve the problem of the poisons being released into our immediate atmosphere, there won’t be anyone around to freeze or burn when the upper atmosphere gets around to imploding. .
At least once a week we hear about an oil pipe bursting in Michigan or Arkansas, a methane leak shutting down a town in North Dakota, a train spilling a million gallons of oil in Kansas, an oil rig collapsing and poisoning the gulf or a chemical plant or coal dust storage pond collapsing in West Virginia. It isn’t a matter of one or two accidents; it’s an unrelenting attack on the environment, perpetrated by big oil, big gas, big chemical and big coal, when, that is, it isn’t being done by big lumber and corporate farming.
The billionaires who control these industries, realizing that we need energy and really aren’t willing to pay for safe energy, have taken it upon themselves to give us what we want, at a cost far beyond dollars; the destruction of the air we breath and the water we drink. And yet we don’t stop them. Why not? Have they really bought off every congressman, every regulatory agency, every judge and even the people they are poisoning for the price of a low paying job?
Or is it really that we would rather be poisoned by these various essences’ than demand regulation of the industries that are killing us even as they are proclaiming their super-Americanism by decrying any attempt by government regulation to provide us with the clean air and water we need to survive.
Walk the hills of West Virginia and speak to the men who have sold their sons into the early death of the mines for a credit chit at the company store. Speak to the mothers who have abandoned their children to the poison of the industry that cheats them and kills them with no hope of anything else. Say hello to modern slavery because that’s what it is people and if you don’t recognize it you are too dumb for the discussion.
If you live in places like West Virginia you don’t have to worry about global warming because you aren’t going to be around long enough to experience it and your kids probably won’t either.
And why is it that way? Why do we have to live with slow and sometimes not so slow death? It’s because the coal barons and the oil-a-garchs want more – of everything. They want theirs and they want yours and they will do anything, break any law, violate any moral stricture to have more, to have, if they can get it, everythiung.
They have all the money. They have all the power. But you have the numbers and in the end, when they have through their greed and hubris, driven you past your last civilized restraint, you will rise up and take back what is yours even if it means destroying the country that we are all supposed to love.