Can we trade in global Greed for global Greening?
I believe this Corona Virus is intelligent. What if it was put in our pathways on the planet as an agent of change. Stopped in our tracks, we may be forced to reconsider our values.
Apart from the toilet paper hoarding, I'm hearing many more folks sharing stories of kindnesses extended to them and from them to others. I hear the difficulties of being separated from dear ones, difficulties paying for food stuffs when money is not coming in, and how hard it is to stay in the house. Our priorities as humans are to connect, to share love, to hang with our tribe.
We have so many modern conveniences, perhaps we've lost sight of the truly important values: Clean air, fresh water, healthful foods, and human companionship.
For too long corporations have been trying to get rich any which way they can, and compromising our lives as a result. When you foul your own nest, it is not intelligent. When you poison your waters, pollute your air, kill your oceans, and forever change the topography of the landscape by scraping off the tops of the mountains to get what's underneath, it’s likely you're not going to live very long.
Oil, that some First Nations people consider to be the Mother's blood, is not to be burned. It darkens the skies. It heats the planet's atmosphere. She gets angry. She is showing us, by throwing Corona Virus Disease - 19 at us so she may slow us down to appreciate the beauty we stand to lose.
My twenty-five-year-old nephew lives in Los Angeles. He has asthma. On a good day, he says he could run a mile before being short of breath. Since the Shelter In Place order forced everyone inside and we all stopped driving and flying, Nephew says he was shocked a few days ago when he ran four-and-a-half miles before realizing he could breathe with ease! NO POLLUTION! What a concept!!! The only thing that stopped him from running further was that his legs hurt! Not his lungs!!
I remember during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the Peruvian runners had an advantage because they lived at ten to twelve-thousand feet above sea level and were accustomed to a perpetual lack of oxygen in their thin air. What a travesty to sully our air so badly - on purpose! - so we get less oxygen at sea level!
As a kid growing up in LA, I remember every summer afternoon we kids would feel pain in our chests after playing outside. We called it "the Hack." It was the LA smog blackening our lungs. By the time we turned twenty, the Air Quality Control Board of Los Angeles said each child who grew up in the city had lung damage equivalent to a twenty year smoker with a two-pack-a-day habit.
In her well researched tome, "Blowout," Rachel Maddow asserts that the oil and gas companies of this nation were given a 27.5% tax relief package in 1920, when Woodrow Wilson was president. Never changed or amended, it is the longest running welfare package in the history of our nation. Oh, also, our domestic oil companies have none other than themselves to regulate their actions here and around the world.
The Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 was a disaster for wildlife. To "clean it up" Exxon dumped 5,500 gallons of a chemical dispersant on it. When it was determined that British Petroleum's Deep Water Horizon mess in April of 2010 was pouring more than 1,000 barrels of oil a day, (more than four million gallons total), into the Gulf of Mexico, BP threw 300,000 gallons of dispersant into the Gulf as well. Turns out both oil and dispersant are toxic to wildlife and to humans.
At the mouth of the Nigerian Delta, off the coast of Africa, Exxon has placed drilling rigs, which it self-regulates. Sadly, their rigs are leaking eleven million gallons of oil per year. That's the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez disaster per year leaking oil into the Nigerian Delta.
Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon, told a senate hearing, after the Deep Water Horizon fiasco, "We're not well equipped to handle [major spills.]" Maddow asks: If not you, WHO??
The people in Wuhan China, the epicenter of the current pandemic, are seeing blue skies again for the first time in decades. No one has been able to work because the cunning CoVid 19 bug stopped them in their tracks. The factories are not pumping pollutants into the air! No wonder the virus attacks lungs. It wants us to pay attention to the damage we're doing to the air quality world wide. Animals need fresh air too. We are animals. Let us acknowledge that we are addicted to fossil fuels. Let us voluntarily keep the Shelter-In-Place ideal at least one day a week and vote to hold Big Oil accountable for cleaning up its messes, and speed the transition to clean energy. Perhaps our reward will be to see how we might slow or even reverse the rapid fouling our nest!
Clearly the POTUS Trump has no idea what this is all about. Oligarchs, in general, have no idea about anything except money. The Donald has only one thought: “How can I make the best deal... for ME?”
According to our ( ) leader, this C-19 scare was a hoax promoted and thought up by the democrats. It wasn't real until his handlers finally took him to the corner of the ring and talked him into READING the teleprompter. Even then, he ad-libbed and called it "the Chinese Virus." Scum bag. Racist PIG. I get so angry at his racism, misogyny, divisive tactics, and for discounting the severity of this world-wide health challenge. Think of the wasted time, and opportunities to squelch the disease in its tracks in Washington State, this country's epicenter, because the bully in his pulpit in Washington DC, on the other side of the country discounted the science. His base, having tasted the Kool-Aid, swallowed this pronouncement too, acting as if the Corona Virus is not as contagious and deadly to some as it is.
AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!
No wonder it's been so healing to do aerobic weeding in my back yard with a vengeance this week as I shelter in place. It's so satisfying to imagine I'm pulling orange hairs out by the roots off the head of the scariest leader I've known in my lifetime. I wasn't alive when Hitler was in charge of Germany, nor when Mussolini ruled in Italy. Now, we have MOUSSE-olini, as my husband calls him. And he's a holy terror terrorizing anyone who disagrees with him or doesn't like the taste of his Kool-Aid.
Peter Alexander is a good reporter. He got ripped a new one by the POTUS for asking a legitimate question which riled up The Donald so bad, that he spewed puke green vitriol and luminous venom on the gentleman. I HATE the Donald.
Several Republican Senators are out ill with the virus and unable to vote. Will Mitch McConnell poison the Donald to save the GOP? Will Pence ride into the Whitehouse in the vacuum? And will he perhaps be defeated by Biden in November?
Will we be any better off?
Hoping for GREEN to triumph over GREED!
We may need to take the reins into our own hands at local levels of government.
Happy Hunkering to you. May all be well.
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