A. Daniel Bodine
desertmountaintimes.com
Environmentalist Bill McKibben's story “Texas GOP Fights Catastrophic Wildfires With Prayer and Global Warming Denial,” copyrighted by Independent Media Institute and posted on the liberal website alternet.org/ Monday, April 25, was correct when it said people on the planet Earth (which includes Texas, yes) cannot survive the way we are now unless we reduce our carbon footprint.
Scientific data confirms too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is threatening to throw the planet's systems out of kilter, yes.
Where McKibben was wrong though was his backhanded attempt to link Gov. Rick Perry's religious request for citizens to actually pray for rain (as a drought-breaker, yes, against horrendous damages by wildfires in April) to his poor secular leadership in Austin positioning the state among the worst atmospheric polluters in the world. An environmentalist, the Guv ain't. You got that right, pardnuh!
“...Were it a separate country, Texas would be the seventh highest carbon emitting nation on the planet,” McKibben wrote. And then he followed the charge by chronicling how the governor and his GOP administration fights “even the most modest EPA restrictions on greenhouse gases.”
He's awful, yes, our governor is. But being “good ol' boy”-awful and being a conscious sinner in the eyes of God are two different things. McKibben failed to connect his dots. If he'd come up to a court judge prior to publishing that article wanting an arrest warrant in the case, he'd been told, “You haven't established Probable Cause! This the only stuff on him 'ya got!?”
In Texas, both Democratic and Republican parties have their own political bibles, going back to the Battle of the Alamo. (Help me out here, Jethro! Where can I find a link directing readers to this? Huh? Quick!) In both big books, it says flatly, in Texas you don't rip someone for praying for rain, regardless of how much polluting he's doing in his stiff-shirt day job. For you're simply showing your naivete and are a cause of embarrassment!
Everybody prays for rain in Texas, folks! What else do you do when you run out of other options? And trust me, we're the least optioned state in the union! You think ol' Generalissenmo Santa Anna was crazy when he spat out those famous words enroute to his Alamo debacle? “If I owned both Hell and Texas, I'd live in Hell and rent out Texas!” Huh? He said that! You think he was crazy?!
No, folks have been praying for rain in Texas long before King Henry VIII ran off with his ninth wife. And prior to last week's storms (Which were immediately after the Guv did urge folks to pray for rain, mind 'ya—it just came in the wrong part of the state!), there hadn't been any recorded rain in the state since September, 2010. What else are 'ya gonna do if you're the governor in a situation like that? Call in Winnie the Pooh for a rain dance? Gee!
Now I wouldn't go so far as call Mr. McKibben a two-faced “Yankee” (and now that it's been brought up, yes, in fact, that could explain his insensitivity to the issue), it's just that he's showing the same irrelevant tendency to plunder points in his “pray for rain” jab at Perry as those industrial revolution-built Northern states are showing this year in their non-observance of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War--disrespectfully turning a cold shoulder to both the pain and the contributions connected to its past..
Again, it's as though by ignoring or distancing themselves from history, they can both criticize and keep their hands lilly-white in whatever is passing in this the present, as well as whatever happens in the future. Ponder these words, will 'ya?!
“(In Framingham, Mass., t)he gravesite of a Union Army major general sits largely forgotten in a small cemetery along the Massachusetts Turnpike,” reads an April 17 Associated Press story ran on the History News Network a couple days afterward.
“A piece of the coat worn by President Abraham Lincoln when he was assassinated rests quietly in a library attic in a Boston suburb. It's shown upon request, a rare occurrence. A monument honoring one of the first official Civil War black units stands in a busy intersection in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse, barely gaining notice from the hustle of tourists and workers who pass by each day.”
And there's not irony in that, and being disrespectful to someone praying for rain? In contrast, what's the South doing?
“As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, states in the old South — the side that lost — are hosting elaborate re-enactments, intricate memorials, even formal galas highlighting the war's persistent legacy in the region,” the story continues.
“But for many states in the North — the side that won — only scant, smaller events are planned in an area of the nation that helped sparked the conflict.” It begs the question, what is it the North doesn't want to confront?
Indeed, jumping on the governor in his bid to rustle up prayers for rain, while being part yourself (indeed, if'n that's the case) of a folk who fails to commemorate the biggest historical event ever in their culture, is being both sacrosanct and callously insensitive to one's own heritage, it seems. And you've got room to criticize someone truly leaning on religion in a time of severe drought?
Uttering Pray for Rain, for Texans, is the same as making the Sign of the Cross for Catholics, a prayerful reach toward God's divine face of hope in an effort to solve problems that with only our limited tools of platitudes, we ain't got a mosquito's chance in an East Texas, smoke-filled swamp of fixing ourselves.
What McKibben was doing was castigating Texans in general and our governor in particular for us believing in our exceptionalism—Believing we'll dodge this climate bullet while turning a blind eye to scientific data that, indeed, shows we have something to worry about.
But it's unfair to play mixin'-'n-matchin' in an issue like this. Why shouldn't citizens here believe we're part and parcel of something history can only label as “exceptional?” And that somehow we're gonna claw our way out of a bad situation?
Geographically, we've been culled both from East Coast and West Coast cultures. Topographically, we were belched up from once a seafloor and transformed instead into thousands of green acres of pine forests, on one side; and then stretched westward 59 days of hard riding by horseback into hundreds of thousands of acres of rough and jagged, dry mountainous desert, on the other. And that's not reason for an occasional catharsis by its people?
Admittedly, yes, Texas is a scat-brat state, culturally forged from what once was a scat-brat separate nation. We've a history of having to overcome this, overcome that–everything from invasions by foreign countries to invasions by the worst kind of pestilent insects in God's creation.
So it's only natural we look to the divine power for help in riding out yet another storm. Praying for rain, in this instance, was as natural as breathing.
So there! With natural words like that, the governor leaned on the ol' standby and sought divine intervention. And you're gonna criticize him for that? Huh?`
The Defense rests its case!
– 30 --
No comments:
Post a Comment