Don't Worry, Be Envirohappy

Wasn’t Y2K supposed to bring down western economies and topple all the evil Zionist/Christian capitalist cesspools of greed and inequity? I remember reading that Nostradamus predicted that the end of the world would occur in 2000. Or maybe it was Osama Bin Laden or something. Whatever the case, Y2K turned out to be a dud, just like all the other doomsday predictions of all the other nutcase chicken littles that litter our historical landscape.

In the 1970s we were told by many concerned scientists that all the earth’s oil would be depleted in 25 years or so and if we didn’t stop driving and start turning down our thermostats we would all suffer a horrible fate. That was almost 40 years ago. And to quote Mark Twain: it would seem that rumors of our deaths were greatly exaggerated. Huge new reserves of oil are being found every year all over the world.

And there was another false alarm in the 1970s. Newsweek ran an article on the pending global cooling crises. Honest. Back then, scientists from all over the world had joined together to warn us of a coming ice age. (Sound familiar?) Temperatures would plummit, crops would die and, then, so would we - alone and freezing in the dark. And not just the people in western Canada, as Pierre Trudeau suggested. Everyone.

Scientists, it would seem, are not at all infallible.

These days the angst-ridden, socialist scare-mongers have invented a new demon to trot out and terrify us with – global warming. Oh, excuse me, I meant “climate change”. Hell, it’s only been a few years since the capitalist-hating, white-guilt troupe first arrived on the scene with their latest scheme to bring down the west and already they’ve rebranded themselves. It’s no longer “global warming”. After all, that term actually appears to mean something and its purveyors might one day be called to task if “warming” doesn’t literally occur in the manner they predict. So, they concocted a new term that is so shifty – so oblique and shadowy in nature - that no one will ever be able to nail it or them down.

And they are clever. Unlike ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’ can’t be disproved. The climate is constantly changing. A term like “climate change” can mean something one day and something else the next. Is this year colder than last year? Run for the hills, it’s ‘climate change’. Has the temperature in the arctic been a few degrees warmer in the 1990s than in the 1980s? Egad, stock up on canned goods and dig a shelter. It’s ‘climate change’.

Yep. Climate change is the perfect concocted crisis for a liberal to hang his hat on. It can’t be proven now; and by the time it can be disproven, its purveyors will be dead of old age. They certainly won’t be dead because of non-existent global warming. Damn. There I go again. Sorry. I mean “climate change”.

Throughout its history, the earth has been going through a continuous cycle of so-called climate change. For awhile it was hot and dinosaurs roamed. For awhile it was cold, ice caps formed and mastodons trudged about. This stuff occurred naturally for millions of years before people even started burning fossil fuels. How do we know it’s not just occurring naturally now – if it’s occurring at all?

Recently I saw some pictures on the web showing how ice formations on Mars are shrinking - just like our polar ice caps apparently are now. Wow. I never imagined that the emissions from Al Gore’s limo could actually permeate earth’s atmosphere and travel hundreds of millions of miles to Mars where they could actually start a global warming (ooops, I mean climate change) phenomenon. Apparently, white Christian capitalist western democracies are not only the plague of mankind, they are also the plague of martiankind. Or, maybe solar activity has something to do with it. Naw. It’s got to be us evil white capitalists. After all, David Suzuki tells us so.

You better just believe it and buy into it 100%. If you don’t, you may just as well be a Christian in Stalinist Russia, a Jew in Nazi Germany, a epileptic in Salem, or a non Muslim in Saudi Arabia. If you doubt the religion (or ideology) of climate change, you better just keep it your dirty little secret, else you will be vilified or worse.

Environmentalism is the new gay. All environmentalists are fabulous. It’s a wonderful way to be and no dissenting views will be tolerated. I predict that, pretty soon, a new word will be introduced to us. 'Envirophobia'. Enviromentalists will be a protected group under our Charter of Rights and freedoms and 'envirophobia' will be featured in a prominent slot on Wikepedia – right beside its brothers: homophobia and islamophobia. You will not be allowed to refute or even think badly of the beliefs of environmentalists.

Already, environmentalism has permeated our consciousness and dominated the media and our education systems in a manner that rivals the spread of AIDS in Africa. And like AIDS, it’s a disease that most of its victims expose themselves to voluntarily - despite of how bad it is for themselves and their society. It’s also a lot like socialism – a mental disease that has caused nothing but misery and hardship wherever it is imposed. No wonder so may rabid environmentalists are socialists. One serves the purpose of the other. Socialism wants to crush western success; and environmentalism will crush western success.

Yep, it's a mental disorder. Why else would it be called environMENTALism?

Look, we really need to wake up. If we allow the enviroradicals to win the day, our society is doomed. Our entire civilization revolves around fossil fuels. Our food, clothing and everything else is transported by train and truck. And don’t forget, here in Canada, we live in a country that is cold much of the year. We need to burn stuff to keep warm and to power our industries.

And one more thing. Even if the purveyors of doom and gloom are right and C02 emissions are putting the planet in peril (and that’s a big if) Canada only produces 2% of the globe’s greenhouse gasses. So even if we closed half our electrical plants and factories, pulled half our vehicles off the road and cut our personal consumption in half, we would only reduce total global emissions by 1%. Meanwhile Russia, China and India, three of the biggest polluters, would continue to puff out their pollution at unchecked rates.

Maybe some Canadians would be willing to freeze in the dark while waiting for a solar powered bus to take their sorry unemployed asses to the soup kitchen, but I am not. Maybe I’ll consider it if David Suzuki, Al Gore and every envirohappy movie star in Hollywood starts driving a tiny hybrid car, moves to a solar powered bungalow and starts leading by example. Till then, they can just take their pathetic, hypocritical rhetoric and bite me.

Lazy is as Lazy does

I’m a lazy SOB. You are too. Don’t deny it. OK. Maybe on a relative scale, based on the current reality, you probably aren’t any better or any worse than any of the other lazy SOBs out there. But, compared to someone who lived a few generations ago, you’re definitely a lazy, slothful SOB.

You wake up in the morning. You don’t have to bother yourself with trying to read a complicated dial to tell what time it is. Just read the numbers. 7:00. And if you want to nod off for another few minutes, just hit the snooze. 7:09. And again. 7:18. And again 7:27. Oops, it’s getting late, better get up. And don’t even try and figure out why every snooze feature on every freakin’ clock radio in the bloody world is set at 9 minute intervals instead of, say, 5, 10 or even 15. The world’s greatest scientists have been trying for decades to solve that little mystery. The truth is, no one really knows. So just put it out of your mind and get up, hit the button on the coffee maker, turn on the TV to see what the weather will be like, check your blackberry for urgent messages and head for the hot shower. It all seems so natural and right. These are not luxuries at all. They are simply essential tools to help your sorry ass survive in this stressful, challenging world. If your ancestors were still alive, however, they might disagree. They were up at dawn, lighting the coal stove, drawing water from the pump and emptying the chamber pots.

None of this nonsense for us though. We have evolved. No exertion necessary. All we need to know how to do to survive today can be done with one button pushing finger or one knob twirling fist. And I mean everything.

We don’t get up to change the channel. We sit inert and push a button. We don’t light a fire to cook, we twirl a knob on the stove or push a button on the microwave. We don’t use elbow grease to wash our clothes or dishes. We lean over and push a button. Argh. Be careful. All that leaning is going to wreck havoc on your fragile back. We don’t need to hold a pen and move our arm to write or do a calculation. We just rest our elbows on the desk and push a few buttons on a computer or calculator. OK, technically they’re called keys, but they’re really densely compacted square buttons. Even erasing takes less energy. And there’s no rubber debris to sweep off the desk. That, in itself, probably saves thousands of people a year from dieing from exertion.

It is virtually unfathomable for me to grasp that years ago accountants, bookkeepers and clerks did all their calculations by hand and kept everything meticulously organized in paper files. And what about the great prose and poetry classics? All were written by hand on paper with a quill or pen loaded manually with ink. And no spell check. How did they do it? I would be sorely challenged to organize my thoughts and compose anything that way without pages full of strikeouts and erase marks. And I can’t even imagine having to walk to the book case or, heaven forbid, the library, to look up words or research anything. Not when the internet is right there with any bit of information I need.

And don’t forget music. It used to be that we actually had to get up and turn over a record in order to listen to an entire album. Now we just hit 'shuffle' on our CD players or Ipods and furgedaboutit. Oddly, we don’t seem to enjoy music as much as we used to. Maybe its because most of today’s music is substandard crap. Or maybe it’s because the effort required to actually do something is directly proportional to the amount of enjoyment derived from the experience. Hey, call me crazy.

Even our cars are made to save us the pesky responsibility of working too hard. No more window-elbow from rolling down the windows. We just press a button. No more changing gears. Just put the car in D and drive. No annoying clutch to work. (My left leg is so grateful.) Power steering alleviates the need to work too hard turning corners. And I’m sure those digital presets on the radio have saved a million lives. And then there’s the intermittent wipers which save us from the interminable agony of having to turn them on and off when precipitation becomes unpredictable.

Buttons, keys, knobs, levers and switches; silicon chips and circuit boards; on board computers and electronic sensors; voice activated computer and cellular technology; remote controlled doors and ignitions; stuff that turns on and off by itself. What more could a lazy SOB possibly ask for. Surely we have attained utopia.

And the absolute best is when our stuff talks to us. Don’t bother running for the phone. Good heavens, you could break a sweat. Just let the answering machine take it. And don’t worry about missing your email. Your computer will tell you when an urgent message comes in. Sorry about the spam. Our bathroom scales talk, the appliances talk, the cars talk, the machines that answer the phone when you call the service centre to complain about a broken talking machine talk. Our educators tell us that we should listen to our kids more. Hell, who’s got the energy after wading through the labyrinth of voice prompts when we call the school board.

And god almighty, even the elevators talk. Where I work, a soft feminine voice emanates from the elevator walls sweetly announcing every floor when the car stops. She even lets us know whether we are “going up” or going down” when the door closes. I don’t expect that I will ever go postal, but, hey, you never know. And if I do, I won’t arrive at work with a shotgun and go after my coworkers. Oh no. I’ll march straight into the elevator and send that nice automated voice straight to techno-hell.

Then I’ll sit in the lobby, call the elevator company and wait for their voice mail to finally connect me with a real person. The way I figure it, if I attentively follow the automated instructions and press the buttons like I’m told, I'll be out on bail before I get to talk to a real person. Or maybe I’ll just ignore the voice prompts, pretend to be on a rotary phone and wait a few minutes for an attendant (“who will be happy to serve me”) to come on the line. As we all know, that’s really the only way to get service over the phone these days.