We Are
ALL Pelicans: The Harsh Consequences Of Environmental
Pollution
14 July 2010By Jane Stillwater
Last night I dreamed that I was interviewing Oscar the
Grouch. But when I woke up, I discovered that it was
only a leg cramp that had caused the dream. Do you
know how to cure leg cramps? Here's how. Use an
exercise that physical therapists call "The clam
shell".
Assuming that this evil cramp is in your right leg,
then lie down on your left side, thrust your right hip
as far to the left as you can go, bend your right leg
half-way, and then move your right knee up to the
ceiling and down to the bed or floor a few times --
like a clam shell opening and closing. Voila. End of
cramp.
It's the sideways motion of your leg that does it. The
muscles get confused. They think that they are only
spozed to move back and forth, not sideways.
And clams got me to thinking about pelicans and all
that oil-spill mess in the Gulf. If someone doesn't
contain that spill soon, our oceans could become
hopelessly polluted -- and if the oceans lose their
ability to breath oxygen into the atmosphere and our
oceans die, then you and me will probably die too.
When our oceans' inability to process oxygen is
combined with our disappearing forests' inability to
process oxygen plus our reduced oxygen levels caused
by car exhaust, air travel and war machines, then any
fool can tell that we humans will soon be in big
trouble -- not to mention that nobody seems to notice
the huge amounts of totally dangerous nuclear waste we
are accumulating, along with enough piles, mounds and
masses of plastic Coke bottles generated daily to be
seen from the moon if they were all in one place.
Am I the only one alive today that notices this stuff?
Anyway, after I woke up from the Oscar the Grouch
dream, I got to thinking about pelicans. You know, the
ones all covered with oil; the ones with the look in
their eyes that says, "What happened? What hit me?
Help!" And that "greasy-pelican" look could pretty
much become ours soon too, in a shorter amount of time
than we would like -- covered with pollution,
wondering what the freak had happened to us and slowly
dying.
Not only that but there are approximately six billion
people on the planet right now and each one of us has
added at least one plastic bottle per (week, day,
month, check one) to the landfill -- or what used to
be our farmland. Dig into the ground almost anywhere
20 years from now and you won't hit oil. You'll hit
plastic. And rusted-out old cars. And toxic chemical
sludge. And nuclear waste.
Unless something changes drastically in the very near
future, in less time than we can imagine, we are all
gonna be pelicans too.
PS: Actually, the human race does have one saving
grace on the horizon -- the end of oil. When we are
out of oil in a few decades, at least there won't be
so much carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere
any more. Who would have thought that being forced to
go back to candlelight, horse-drawn buggies, caissons,
cavalry and manual typewriters would be just the
ticket to save the human race from extinction?
PPS: I was listening to progressive radio talk-show
host Mike Malloy the other day and some right-winger
commented that, "If only Ronald Reagan was alive
today, he would have searched for an answer to the oil
spill problem -- and to all of our other problems
too." Dream on, wingnut. The only answers that Ronald
Reagan ever searched for involved looking for newer
and better and more corrupt ways to make him and his
rich buddies even richer.
I'm not sure if I got Mike Malloy's quote exactly
right here or not -- because I was too busy cleaning
my apartment to take notes. Yes, after all these years
I've finally found a house-cleaning system that works
for me! Every weekday between 6 pm and 8 pm, I listen
to Malloy's radio talk-show on Green 960 AM and clean
house. Then I get so angry at all the major Republican
neo-con screw-ups he tells us about that I take my
anger out on my apartment and actually manage to get
stuff cleaned up and/or thrown out.
Next I'm going to take on gardening, another task that
I hate, and garden from noon to 3 pm every day while
listening to Randy Rhodes -- taking my anger out on
the weeds.
Currently every kind of right-winger you can imagine
is busy telling me that if only America puts
Republicans back in office, then they will clean up
America's mess. Not! Republicans and their various
rich-dude allies are the very ones who made most of
this freaking mess in the first place -- as well as
getting all us poor sweet victims of their nefarious
plans to be all scrambling at each others' throats
while they, like the Beagle Boys, clean out the mint.
It's like the old "Hair of the dog that bit you"
theory I guess -- that if we only drink more of the
Republican neo-con Kool-Aid that got us drunk in the
first place, our hangover from the last batch won't
hurt quite so badly? How naive do they think that we
are?
If we really want to clean house in Washington, we
should do it while listening to Mike Malloy!
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