“Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act.” Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken
Writing is tricky business, especially when you want to say something that really matters to you. You don’t want to sound too mad, or too passionate about a thing, or heaven forbid condescending; and you certainly don’t want to sound like a total idiot.
I once wrote grandly, “In a world as troubled as ours, we must always take heart and forge on.” Uhm. Stupid. Acid just refluxed into my mouth.
The other bad thing about writing is that I grow out of things. I may write about my passionate desire to save the planet now, but in twenty years I may cringe at my naïveté or unrealistic utopian leanings. I may one day hate the stupid Earth and dumb polar bears and Eagles, the stinky things. I may be driving a bulldozer for the pleasure of destroying large swaths of pristine endangered species habitat for all I know. I may develop bad habits like drowning baby kittens and eating horse meat. I can’t tell you how often I read something I wrote a long time ago and gag. Thank God I was not published. Hopefully I never will be; what a horrific reminder of earlier stupidities. Not long enough ago I was writing about how much I loved designer purses, sunglasses and shopping at Nordstrom’s.
“I bought a new Coach purse, a pair of Bulgari sunglasses and a timeshare in Mexico today,” I wrote. How embarrassing.
TT said, “Whenever you are on a new kick, I just roll my eyes and ignore you instead of getting super annoyed; and I know that you will be over it soon enough and onto something else.”
So now TT, I would like to talk about my present annoying stuff: Environmentalism and Feminism. Seriously does it get any worse? But why is it that environmentalism has such a tainted sound to it? Why is it degraded, reduced, lessened, and treated like a nonsensical silliness? Whereas, tough, loud, aggressive endeavors are cool (like pounding a man in the face for five rounds, or clearing a hundred acres of wooded forest to build twenty lawned houses); things like caring, nurturing and loving Nature are often considered silly.
Caring, nurturing and loving animals, plants and Nature is silly. Even as I write this, I think it sounds super dumb. It sounds girlie and whining. Why? TV, (which shapes our nation’s very being), and many men idolize women when they are skinny, young, hot, physically mutilated to maximum endowment, cutesy and without an important thing in their tiny, white heads. Hot, half-naked young bodies are splattered all over the television like soft porn to entice and lure people into buying shit. The large-fake-breasted, not very smart, not very old kind of girl is acceptable. But women who care, nurture and love Nature are ridiculous.
It is a Man’s World any way you slice it where the Girl’s Next Door, Pamela Andersons, and Jessica Simpsons of the world are how guys like it. And guys will laugh and talk about how stupid those hot girls are all the while imagining fornicating with them, which is all part of the degradation. The message: Be Hot, Be Dumb, Be Naked, Be Quiet. So when a woman comes along and doesn’t want to be hot, or dumb or quiet, the rut of ridiculing, reducing and demeaning occurs. Therefore, when I say I care about Nature and I want you stupid fucking assholes to stop killing whales and wolves, and stop polluting, and stop cutting down old growth forests and stop messing with Spotted Owls, I am easily dismissed.
“Oh now, isn’t that cute, she loves whales,” I hear.
Or worse, “What a dumb bitch, fuck those stupid dumb whales and wolves, all that matters is me, my dick, my dually truck, and my hunting license.”
Women and their fluffy ideas and their voices are silenced, ridiculed by those who would rather you look like a Barbie and sound like a mute while they sit with a half-hard-on watching hot cheerleaders, football or boxing because men running into each other super hard and punching one another until blood spurts from their heads is a superior endeavor compared with women who don’t want Japan to kill all the whales in the ocean, or loggers to raze trees that stood before the Greeks were the Greeks.
Oh and then those dumb Barbie Girls do get up and say, don’t wear minks it is mean, we love animals….and since they have put themselves in a position to be ridiculed and ignored and only to be stared at, then the things they say, even if they may be important, sound totally stupid and bring down their cause.
Why is it a feminist issue? Because it is a Man’s World and the attitudes today are trained and bent on aggression and destruction. Aggression and destruction is all good and natural, but there must be a balance. The aggressive agenda has been pursued and forced down our throats long enough, time to Man Up and speak out about the destruction of nature by those who feel that whales, wolves and polar bears are the fluffy stuff of a stupider gender.
As individualistic as we Americans mean to be, we are pack animals, social in nature, and we need each other to form ourselves and our ideas. In Medieval prisons, the isolated prisoners craved human contact so much that he would scribble notes on small chips of stone with his blood, and pass the notes through the cracks to communicate. The Internet and the social networks remind me of those isolated prisoners. We 21st century citizens are so isolated from one another that we desperately communicate via FaceBook.com and MySpace.com.
Corporations and the TV programming they control, and plug-in to our brains understand our pack mentality, our drive to be like each other and fit in.
"Television is the literature for the illiterate, the culture of the low-brow, the wealth of the poor, the privelage of the underprivelaged, the exclusive club for the excluded masses." Lee Loevinger
If the people on TV are our friends and enemies, and the TV is our society; then the television is our pack that can shape our most intimate feelings and ideas. The McDonalds and Walmarts of the Corporate World have a direct feeding tube, an IV drip as it were, from their bottom line offices directly to your brain; they tell you how to think. Exxon funds “think tanks” that are formed specifically to counter climate change efforts and put false but seemingly reasonable information on the tube and in our newspapers.
Exxon's contributions are as follows:
Action Institute for the Study of Religious Liberty $155,000
American Council of Capital Formation $250,000
The American Council on Science and Health $90,000
The American Enterprise Institue $960,000
The American Legislative Exchange Council $712,000
Citizens for a Sound Economy$302,150
Reason Public Policy Institute $230,000
Competitive Enterprise Institute $1.74 million
Cold Earth Society $8 million.
The corporations have the money, the tube to your brain, the genius minds to make it all sound reasonable, and our willingness if we sit by stupidly. And they have the capacity and desire to devour our natural settings so they can regurgitate it and feed it back to us. This is why it is so vital for you to speak up and put your ideas out there to counterbalance that unnatural force. The internet is like that scribbled blood note that keeps we desperately separated individuals in a pack. It is not the healthiest, but we do what we can. It is our microphone that can transmit our voices, it can give we little people the voice and power that television has given Coca Cola. We can post info on our Facebook that concerns us like the ad for the movie, The Cove that I saw my friend Carol Schill post. It is about the dolphin harvesting trade in Japan. My Mom posted an excellent link about Reinstating Protection for the Northern Rockies Wolves. I have posted different things on my Facebook that you just click to send a message to your representative or sign a petition that is directed to the relevant authority. The internet can make these small powerful steps quite simple.
Why is it important? Corporations are powerful; they will not let up…they are relentless. You don’t have to move the entire human race to effect change. If the town hall meetings have proved one thing, it is that the loud, annoying, obnoxious idiots get shit going. Act like those idiots only with a more correct and educated purpose. But do not stand down, do not step aside, do not cringe, do not tolerate your opinion being denigrated or reduced by the burping, heinous fools who have shaped opinions for too long. The Powers That Be or The White Male Establishment or whatever you want to call it starts with corporate CEO’s and trickles down to the farting man on the couch. The same people who will Kitty Kat your issues and tell you to go sit on your frilly sofa, also would love to have you shut up so they can watch the bimbos on Brett Michaels Rock of Love Remember who is criticizing you with his stupid beer belly and bad breath.
Some of this commentary is brought about because I watched The Sea Shepherd episode where the whalers outran and then harpooned a whale that took twenty five minutes to die. I read the stupidest rude remarks on Facebook about the unimportance of whales and those who care but in quite different terms. I usually ignore that crap because then I write long tirades about the White Male Establishment and the Oppression of Everyone. It is a few voices that make a huge difference. It only takes a hundred letters to each senator in every state to kick some ass. You could generate ten yourself by just asking a few friends to point and click on a website that makes it easy.
One of the biggest arguments for whaling, polluting, and/or ignoring climate change is that “Saving whales” or “Saving Trees” or “Saving the Planet” is economically unsound. That it will hurt our beloved economy. Are we not fat enough? When will we be? When will the decadence and horror of our Economy First Mentality become apparent to more? By the way, I don’t think hunting is wrong or immoral in and of itself. But an overpopulated species hunting an under-populated species isn’t going to last. And it isn’t hunting that is being done, it is mass harvesting for a 6.784 billion human population and that is different.
When you get to the second half of your life, and you have pretty much raised your kids, you want to make the rest count. I don’t want to just work hard to accumulate more shit. I want to work hard so that in the end, my life counted. What is this blog then? It is a rally cry. It is cheerleading in a higher, evolved form; it is a question and an encouragement. It is a plea to those who can and to those who will to take a stand and draw a line in the sand with me.
“Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.” David Brower
How to be a 21st c. Activist
1. Use the internet. Sign up for Action Alerts so you can point and click letter write/send.
2. Grow a garden. I wish somebody would have told me how easy it is to grow food. I have lettuce, tomatoes and carrots for a salad everyday, and zucchini by the armloads for zucchini muffins.
3. Compost. Don’t take it too seriously. Do it wrong if you must…just throw your food in a barrel that closes tight. Toss some dirt and/or leaves on top to keep the smell down. Or do it right, read: http://Composting101.com .
4. Buy eco-friendly products. Research. Use plant based soaps, detergents and make-up. The stuff they sell at the normal stores is oil-based which is well, oil-based. Think about it.
5. Buy organic. That way food and flowers are grown without using herbicides and pesticides. Don’t let the spin prevent you from buying right. It does make a difference.
Whale oil is little used today and modern commercial whaling is for food. The primary species hunted are the Common Minke Whale and Antarctic Minke Whale, two of the smallest species of baleen whales. Recent scientific surveys estimate a population of 103,000 in the northeast Atlantic and 665,074 around Antarctica. Brazil, Argentina and South Africa argue that whale watching is a growing billion-dollar industry that provides more revenue and more equitable distribution of profits than commercial whaling from far-away developed countries. Peru, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand also support proposals to permanently forbid whaling South of the Equator, as Indonesia is the only country in the Southern Hemisphere with a whaling industry.
NUMBER OF WHALES KILLED BY WHALERS:
Whaling Season:
200-2001 1,015
2001-2002 1,151
2002-2003 1,322
2003-2004 1,388
2004-2005 1,324
One Bad Mom
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