Today is Blog Action Day, and the subject is the environment. I signed up to participate, so I guess I'd better stick to it.
THAT WAS THEN
I participated in the first Earth Day. Earth Day, 1970
A big group of us met and either walked or rode bicycles to school. The next day I was back driving my 1965 Mustang, so I guess I wasn't very committed to radical environmentalism. I did begin to pay attention to creating less waste, reusing and recycling. And I put one of those Ecology Flag decals on the car window, mostly because it pissed off my mother. (Back them she was a Republican and horribly embarrassed by her hippy daughter. Somehow in the intervening years she has become a left wing wacko who thinks we should take money from rich people and give it to her because “women get screwed”.)
THIS IS NOW
I cannot abide “No Impact Man”. I see no reason for us all to revert to the Stone Age, cook over open fires, read by candle light and wipe our butts with leaves. Since his family is joining him in this little publicity stunt, why isn't he calling them “No Impact FAMILY”? Why is he only giving himself the credit, while his family has to go without toilet paper for a year? I saw a bit about them on TV, and it showed his wife enjoying ice cubes at work. I'll bet that she also enjoys a good ass wiping there too.
I don't understand why Al Gore was given the Nobel Peace Prize. I suppose that there might be some tenuous connection between global warming and world peace, but Al Gore doesn't back up his talk with personal action. Al Gore's House (Perhaps the prize was given to him for inventing the internet.)
So, what do I do? I do what I can. I use canvas shopping bags. The plastic bags that I use for produce get reused until they're too beat up or I use them for dog poop clean up. I buy in bulk to reduce packaging. I buy a lot of things at thrift stores. I recycle bottles and cans. I make compost. I only run the dishwasher for a full load. I use those new fangled fluorescent light bulbs wherever possible. I quit using bottled water for everything and bought one of those Brita filters, which makes the tap water here drinkable. There's no way in hell I'm giving up toilet paper, although I do try to only use the amount necessary to complete the job. It's not practical for me to give up my car. The public transportation system in this city sucks the big one. In order to get to my last job, which was 17 miles from my house and a 25 minute drive, public transportation would have required me to leave my house two and a half hours before I had to be at work, and get home two and half hours after getting off. That's five hours a day folks. Add to that the nine hours at work, that's 14 hours away from home. With eight hours of sleep, one hour to get ready for work I would have had one whole hour for personal time a day. Barely enough time to feed the dogs. Like I said, I do what I can. I think that if everyone does just one thing to save resources and/or energy a day it would make a big difference. Global warming may or may not be caused by humans, but there's no reason we can't all do at least one small thing to make the place we live a little bit better. Many small things add up to a large thing.
2 comments:
Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.
In an interview on CNN in 1999, Gore, who was then the sitting vice president and a candidate to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House, said this by way of reviewing his record:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
Notice that Gore took credit for leadership in Congress in creating the Internet. He never said he “invented” the Internet. Was his claim to such leadership legitimate? Well, here’s what Republican Newt Ginrich said about that:
“(I)n all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a ‘futures group’—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ’80s began to actually happen.”
Way back in 1988, The Guardian, a British paper, reported this:
“American computing scientists are campaigning for the creation of a ’superhighway’ which would revolutionise data transmission. Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the new network, which scientists say they can have working within five years, at a cost of Dollars 400 million.”
Years later, when Gore was vice president, computer scientist Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet, had this to say:
“I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president.”
History shows that Gore’s claim to leadership in congressional action regarding the Internet was ignored by the media and not distorted into a claim that he invented the Net until the Republican Party cooked up that falsehood a few days after the CNN interview.
Dude,
Lighten up! I guess you left your sense of humor in your other pants.
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