At last night’s School Board meeting, a probably quite cool lady named McKiernan described herself as an “environmental landscape architect.” Not a single chuckle erupting from the large crowd, except my seat.
When I saw she was serious about her occupation, I began daydreaming about how much fun it would be to drift outdoors into the warm early evening Downtown air and watch paint dry.
The Lady was a member of the five- or six-person Environmental Sustainability Committee, which had been introduced one dramatic moment before. If I had a dime for every letter in the committee’s cumbersome title, somebody else would be writing this essay because I would be traveling the world.
(Have you noticed how this gang that can’t talk straight has kidnapped the once respectable term “sustainability” and turned it into a worldwide headline? Do your shoes pass the sustainability test? I hope no one asks whether I have a sustainable marriage. Too many former Mrs. Noonans would spoil the broth, and my answer.)
While The Lady rather fought on, I was thinking that if all American environmentalists were jailed just for one day, we could recover our sanity and retrieve the world. We could go back to the way things were. Imagine going a whole day without hearing the nutbread science that insists soon all of us will be eaten alive by global climate cooling warming, starving panda bears and cats with chicken pox.
Bring Your Own, Pal
The Lady yanked the curtain away from a startling fact: 360,000 plastic bottles are used every year by the School District. Before sprinting home to cry my vegetarian eyes out, I pondered:
If all 360,000 were placed end to end, they could form a kewl walkway by which every environmentalist within sound of my computer keys could climb aboard and pad straight into the deepest part of the ocean. Splash.
Surely you have noticed that all environmentalists dress alike. They are the first visitors to the Saturday morning Helen Keller rummage sales. Whether boys or girls, there is a commonality about them. In many cases they are indistinguishably male or female. Hey, man, it doesn’t matter. We have to save the planet or the whales or those darned cats with chicken pox.
All environmentalists look spare. They live on Slenderella. They will show you their ribs if you will drop a nickel in their handy Heavens to Betsy Let’s Save a Planet Before We Go to Sleep pushke. They have not consumed more than one stale crumb since V-J Day.
Where Have I Heard That?
And praise the Lord, they talk a common language. You would swear there is only one daily script on the whole darned planet for all of them.
They commit (or should be committed) to the identical emotions, laughing in lockstep and crying at the drop of a baby seal. Whop. . Their main talent is getting angry on cue.
They become uniformly furious if they read in MadMagzine.savedaglobe that a 311-year-old crippled polar bear in Antarctica died of heat stroke. Seems too many careless kids sailed their empty plastic bags into oceans girdling the earth and the moon.
They get mad over a stray plastic bag reposing, harmlessly, in the wrong garbage can the way that you or I do when Swish spins his class warfare top.
Sadly, environmentalists are as sincere as a child, with matching naiveté.
With such disruptive thoughts rumbling through the tracks of my mind — wasn’t that Linda Ronstadt? — I could not concentrate on the Environmental Sustainability Committee’s complaint that they had been frozen out of the District decision-making process.
After the paint sufficiently dried, a Ph.D from UCLA, the director of a campus academy that had sustainability, polar bears and environment in its title, was, no kidding, lecturing us dummies on “a cult of sustainability.”
How can you tell when one of these True Believers is in the middle, at the end or just starting an oration on dronability?
