Bring back smogI never heard that before. Adam and Eve were freeloading in the garden. Just a coupla naked dirty hippies. The moral of the story is let's trash the place for short-term gain because "God" will clean up our mess.
The American dream: at the top of the list is being able to get a job. Bring back smog, global warming or whatever it takes to create jobs. God saw that Adam and Eve were going to mess up the Garden of Eden so he told them to put their clothing on and get out. He then gave humans Earth to mess it up, with smog or whatever it takes to create jobs. God was tired of feeding the freeloaders. Start earning a living, by sweat of the brow, smog or whatever it takes; he would come along later and clean up the mess. The nice politicians, having our best interest at heart and not wanting us to get smogged to death, managed to get most factories moved out of the country. I say bring back the smog, down with the green.
JAY C. WHEELER Jonesborough
That is thinking ahead GOP style.
This particular guy has me flummoxed. He's either a brilliant satirist a la Swift or a major moron a la Palin. Perhaps you should look him up and invite him to your upcoming Test the Waters and see if he floats or sinks!
ReplyDeleteI vote for satire. But John what's up with testing the waters? Going back to a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and trying to see if witches float? You can avoid the whole water thing and just see if they weigh the same as a duck.
ReplyDeleteAll the ducks have flown south for the winter, Bob! ;-)
ReplyDeleteI can very much relate to the writer's sarcasm,evidently being struck by a similar bug: the urge to voice things that p..s you off in a way that makes everybody hope he's just kidding.
ReplyDeleteWell, sorta.
I can see his point, though: what good is clean air if you don't have food to eat.
Why preserve the globe for progeny when you can't feed or clothe'em today.
Plus, he's probably seen Alex Jones' "Fall of the Republic" and isn't inclined to swallow the Global Warming hype...
The more we learn about the cosmos, the more I think the story of the Garden of Eve is prophetic. It's about the present and the future as much as it is about the past.
ReplyDeleteImagine trying to till Mars.
Planet Earth is our garden.
The jobs vs. environment argument is a false one.
ReplyDeleteThe contest is between sustainable work at a living wage for everyone vs. greed and exploitation that pits people against each other and Earth.
My brother spent several years in the Philippines, managing a project to protect the Great Hornbills. He would routinely encounter kids standing along the side of the road selling skewers that held the young roasted bodies of an endangered species of heron. He talked with these people and found that this was the only way they had to make money for their families - all the time while corporations were clear cutting the lowland forests around them, displacing them, taking their land, and turning them into sharecroppers, to salve away on their corporate farms.
ReplyDeleteWhen John says "the jobs vs. environment argument is a false one", he is correct. Those skewers should have been used on the people who get rich from this devastation.
Actually, I think the guy was not being sarcastic. This kind of argument is showing up on the right politically, and in comments to the comment line in the local Journal newspaper.
ReplyDeletePretty appalling. But it needs to be taken as a serious argument and countered with facts and stories like the one about the Heron, above.
There is a lot of denial going on in the USA. A lot of people apparently don't want to know the facts or respond to the crisis in meaningful ways. The poem John shared recently says it all.
ReplyDeleteThe Great Turning
It's Advent. Time to wake up. We really do need to change the mind of the human race when it comes to sustainable abundance. We really are not doing the necessary earthkeeping and many people, particularly the poor, are already suffering the consequences.
+ Love + John A Wilde + Whitesboro NY + The John A Wilde Blog + "Why 99, you know we have to murder and kill and destroy in order to preserve everything that's good in the world." --Maxwell Smart to Agent 99
'Actually, I think the guy was not being sarcastic. This kind of argument is showing up on the right politically, and in comments to the comment line in the local Journal newspaper.'
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree. Corporations with a view of humanity that rates corporate executives as 'people' and everyone else in the world as 'consumers' or 'human resources' have built a vision of 'progress' that is fundamentally destructive.
I'm no Neo-Luddite and I /do/ think there are environmental sacrifices that must be made to support civilized society, but the denialists don't even want to admit that the decisions they trumpet /are/ a sacrifice. Nor do they want to admit that there is only so much oil, coal, and natural gas in the world and it will take many millions of years to restore fossil fuels once exhausted.
People have bought into this, especially those people who have knowing or unknowingly accepted their role as serfs in the Neo-Fedual Utopia that neoconservatives, big business, and high finance would create.
As Rev. Shuck says, it's not about jobs vs. environment. It's about critical, realistic thinking vs. a fantasy driven by short term greed.
John Maynard Keynes said 'In the long run, we'll all be dead' in order to explain why the government NEEDED to engage in short term thinking to help those members of society hit hardest by economic difficulty. Corporate executives are now using this same brutal truth to prove another Keynes quote correct:
"Capitalism is the belief that the most wickedest of men engage in the most wickedest behavior for the good of everyone."