Whether it’s on television or in the newspapers or the endless stream of news releases I receive, the message over and over again is that people believe such stupid stuff about the planet and their environment that I keep asking, where do they come from?
People who think they can save the planet by bringing a cloth bag to the supermarket instead of using a plastic one, even though plastic is part of just about everything they will use that day, from their car to their kitchen’s counter top,
People who insist that turning corn into fuel instead of building more refineries to process more oil makes no sense at all because wasting corn in this way forces up the cost of food,
People who think that Green jobs are anything other than temporary, low paying menial work, entirely dependent on government subsidies and handouts,
People who think that it’s wrong to eat meat even though they have a mouth full of teeth whose purpose down through the millennia of mankind is to chew meat,
People whose ancestors survived by hunting long before agriculture was developed, yet think it is cruel to hunt or to cull a population of animals that endanger people or property,
People who think solar or wind energy can even begin to compete with coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy when both require traditional plants to back up “alternative” energy sources. Why? Because the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day and the wind doesn’t blow all the time,
People who think that polar bears are going extinct when, in fact, the polar bear population has been growing for twenty years or more,
People who believe “global warming” is real even though the “theory” was based entirely on seriously flawed, often deliberately false computer models,
People too dumb to realize that the Earth has been cooling for a decade,
People who think all of Nature is “pristine” when much of the Earth is desert or otherwise uninhabitable and inhospitable,
People who do not know that there are countless active volcanoes under the oceans of the world, spewing all manner of “pollutants” or leaking barrels’ worth crude oil,
People who think all chemicals are a danger, but whose bodies are literally mobile chemical processing factories,
People who spend their lives taking chemicals in the form of medicines with specific dose levels and not only do not feel threatened, but are happy to be cured,
People who think chemicals are bad without every realizing they live in a world where chemicals are integral to the manufacture of every device they use whether it’s a computer, a cell phone or something as simple as a spoon,
People who think coal is bad without realizing the U.S. sits atop enough coal to keep the lights on for centuries if we can just mine it,
People who think oil is bad without realizing that oil is a component of everything from asphalt to Vaseline, and that we have millions of barrels of untapped oil the government will not permit Americans to access,
People who pass through twelve years of elementary and secondary schools without learning how to spell or do fractions or ever once reading the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution,
People who go onto college and spend their freshman year in “remedial” classes without realizing they were cheated of a good education by a union more interested in their teacher’s pensions than their ability to function in a complex world,
People who think all religions are equally valid when one of them believes that, if you are an “unbeliever”, you can be killed or robbed with impunity,
People who are anti-war protesters without once thinking that it was a Revolutionary war that made America possible,
People who worship the Earth like Stone Age pagans, but lack the imagination and the faith to conceive of a higher power, a moral one, that sees in us, the image of Himself.
Where do these people come from?
© Alan Caruba, 2010
