life's cruel ironies

I was watching another Scarborough segment during which (the more-overtly-racist every day) Pat Buchanan was railing against the mythical "thirty million dollars for Pelosi's mouse" talking point. I don't have the quotes handy, but Pat was scornful of the very notion of preserving wetlands and wildlife, muttered something about correcting the mouse thing by "get[ting] a cat" and made it quite clear that he just doesn't grasp the concept.

Permit me to explain this to you, Pat.


The Earth is like a person. It is a bunch of seemingly unrelated biochemical systems that are intricately interwoven and that affect each other in ways that are subtle and complex. If you, in your wisdom as the mid-Sixties right-wing type, choose to pave over all of the wild areas, to dig, drill, and excavate with abandon, to obliterate the mating places and birthing places of thousands of species, to use so many pesticides and chemicals that the bees that keep all of us alive start to die off and disappear with no obvious explanation, if you rape the only planet that the human species has, it can't help but have detrimental effects.

Just imagine what would happen if you took a man, packed him into stiff, artificial clothing constructed to convey a message of prestige more than to comport to his body's movement, fed him unhealthful, over-processed food rich in fats and calories, loaded him down with all kinds of artificial chemicals to mask his human aromas, poured carefully-contaminated ethanol into him on a regular basis, prescribed a multitude of complex pharmaceuticals, made him sedentary and doughy, kept him out of sunlight so he was pasty and flabby, drove him everywhere he went with people to wait on him so he didn't have to lift a finger for himself, and thwarted the natural needs of his physical health in every other way possible.


In other words, if you want to see what you are doing to the Earth, take a look in the mirror.