Re “Here Come the Environment Geeks. Hide the Plastic, Murgatroyd.”
Seriously, Mr. Noonan, could you have chosen a less deserving target than Ms. McKiernan and the Environmental Sustainability Committee for your ill-written, contemptuous rant?
Okay, we get it. You think it’s silly for people to care about the environment.
You think the accelerated extinction of species (including ours) makes for good comedy fodder.
Perhaps you intended this as a piece of satire (ala Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”)? If so, I have to say I found it a major misfire to snipe at someone for trying to improve our school community and the lives of our students.
Perhaps I should be thankful that you took a momentary break from your endless whining about Obama. Hey, I’ve got an idea. Maybe you can do your next piece on how irritating you find babies and puppy dogs? Sheesh!
But then perhaps amusing yourself is its own reward.
Mr. Province may be contacted at jprovince@yahoo.com
Ari Noonan comments: As a wounded veteran of a number of marital wars, I accept your well-intended criticism, and surely you are right about the satirical sheen.
Owing to vast vacancies in their day to day lives, environmentalists thrive on abstractions, their pet obsession. Every major environmental principle contains a huge abstract dollop, which serves as the sexy magnet that attracts the unemployed generation. They are the people who constantly are out preaching or marching while the rest of us are hewing to our jobs.
I believe you miss my main point: Most environmentalists I have met are extremists. Moderation is their mortal enemy. The world will die before lunch unless we all eat 13 plastic bags for breakfast, they insist, and when proven wrong, they go to the next crowd of rubes.
Don’t they have children or jobs to worry about? No, many of them are dull, bored singles. They live in a tiny, enormously self-consumed world ruled by junk science they enthusiastically, naively swallow without a trace of verification. Repeatedly, their preposterous environmental bible has been shown to be fraudulent. The findings are ignored. The medicine show moves to the next town.
An environmental hallmark: Their comically exaggerated forecasts, intended to frighten and intimidate, are so far into the future as to be irrelevant or indiscernibly abstract, always with a Frankenstein element.
The plastic bag spoof is my favorite. It would be night club material except that it is the exclusive property of the Angry Left. Leftists, as Swish demonstrates on his daily television appearances, were born without the sense-of-humor gene.
Numerous widely publicized apocalyptic predictions have been made in recent years. When they have been proven wrong, the True Believers say “oh, well,” and they mount a new guess about when the planet will die. Alaska was going to melt a few years ago. The wildlife population was going to drop dead in a month. Many of the True Believers must not have been alive when the opposite condition prevailed and was hailed by the Gotta Be Right set in the 1970s. Hmm.
In conclusion, environmentalists are admirably sincere, but commonly not serious.
As for our mutual friend Swish, what’s to complain about? I can’t remember a time when America was better off unless your memory carries back to the dark ages of ’08, before the November election.
