Who Gives a Shit About Global Warming?

Fine, go ahead and think that global warming is some kind of left-wing conspiracy. At this point, it doesn’t really matter. The evidence that proves continuing to rely on oil and coal for our energy needs is unsustainable is being broadcast on cable and the internet every day. Sure, ecological catastrophes like the BP Gulf Coast oil spill have been happening in places like Nigeria for years but Americans are a NIMBY kind of people and until it affects our oysters on the half shell or Redneck Riviera getaways we could give a shit less. We may put up with poisoned environments in places like Appalachia or Brownsville, Texas but by god, not where we have our vacation home!

I’m not saying we should all give away our cars and start using only solar and wind energy tomorrow but Jesus Christ, can we at least acknowledge that something needs to be done? Monsanto is feeding our citizens food stuff that is rapidly becoming something one step up from soylent green, Massey Energy is lopping off our mountain tops and dumping them into our streams and BP Oil has managed to destroy the fishing and tourism industries in the Gulf Coast for years to come. And that’s not even mentioning the dead plants, animals and people that these toxic industries leave in their wake. How the fuck is this cost effective? And I know that nuclear energy is touted as the new green solution but I don’t buy it. Just like the BP disaster, all it takes is one perfect storm of human fuckups to turn a large part of our country into a vast wasteland.

The President’s Cancer Panel finally admitted that we’re being bombarded with cancer-causing chemicals every day and the industries that we rely on for our energy needs are a big part of the problem. When I was growing up, they taught me that America was the leader of the free world. Well all right, lead! Bite the bullet and fund the programs and research that will bring our country back to being number one in things like life expectancy, educational level attained, and environmental beauty. It reminds me of that study where the kids were offered one marshmallow right away or two if they could wait 15 or 20 minutes. Finding alternative energy sources may cost a little more in the short term, but in the long run, your children and grandchildren will have a lot bigger marshmallow to share.

Earth Day 2010

Okay, I don’t remember the first Earth Day in 1970 but the crying Indian that was introduced in a Keep America Beautiful PSA on Earth Day in 1971 ranks right up there with the Sugar Pops Bear and Charlie the Tuna as an iconic image from my childhood. I grew up in the cave region of Kentucky so you could drive down any country road back then and find the landscape dotted with trash-filled sinkholes as you casually chucked your Burger Chef leftovers out of the open car window.

My ideal Saturday in 1971 was early morning cartoons, a Grape Nehi, and some pickle dog (pickled bologna) at Mrs. Jones' general store and then driving around the back roads all afternoon “dumping”. We didn't actually dump anything but we'd stop at every sinkhole trash heap along the way to look for some valuable collectible. For me, that was a one-legged Ken or a car steering wheel. For my mom and my aunt, it was a soda bottle or an Avon decanter. You don't see that kind of blatant disregard for the earth much anymore but that's not to say that there isn't room for improvement.

Forty years ago we had lakes that caught on fire and now we have mountains being cut off at the throat. I usually lean towards the pessimist’s view but I have to admit that Americans back then were able to change their mindset about the benefits of not pitching trash in their own backyard so maybe there’s still hope that we’ll be able to pull our heads out of the sand in regards to global warming and the carte blanche we’ve given large corporations to rape our mountains and streams. Or... Maybe not. Per the supreme court, corporations are just plain folks too. Narcissistic, homicidal, sociopathic folks perhaps, but people nonetheless.

Born Again Hard

All right, it’s official. I’ve lost my fucking mind. I attended boot camp last Tuesday. Okay, it was beat cancer boot camp but still, considering my fear and loathing of calisthenics and group activities, it’s a miracle that I didn’t run screaming to my car the first time “Sarge” blew the whistle. Not that the thought didn’t cross my mind. I’m just glad it wasn’t for real because I’m afraid I’d be the fat guy in Full Metal Jacket who got the soap beating from his fellow Marines. By the time I figured out what the hell we were doing, they had already moved on to something else. Even the two little girls who wandered over with their dad picked it up faster than me.

I had no idea when I wrote my last blog post that boot camp would be the end result. It seems I’m all for telling other people about charitable causes but when it comes to actually doing something…Umm, not so much. That’s why when my sister and nephew suggested that we join a team running in The Bourbon Chase to raise money for schizophrenia research my first reaction was, Oh hell no! But after looking at their website I somehow convinced myself that, by god, I can do this!What was I thinking?!My idea of exercise is walking to the mailbox to pick up a magazine I can lay on the couch and read. A 200 mile overnight relay where I have to run three legs of approximately five miles each, oh yeah, that's doable.

So that's what drove me to doing situps in some park I'd never heard of. I wanted to find out just how bad the situation really was. And it wasn't pretty. I'm going to start my training walking and try to build up to a light jog. The last time I broke out into a full tilt run was when I was thirteen and some old man in the neighborhood came to the door armed when me and my friends were out ringing doorbells in the middle of the night. There's nothing like the blast from a shotgun to get the blood moving and the adrenaline pumping. I'm hoping it won't take something that drastic to get me motivated this time. Maybe the free bourbon at the end of the course will be enough.

The Silver Ribbon Coalition

Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com
As a breast cancer survivor, the whole pink ribbon thing makes me feel kind of guilty. I know there are other diseases that are also in dire need of research funding but they don’t get the same publicity. One that has been even more devastating than breast cancer for my immediate family is paranoid schizophrenia. My brother was senior class president and voted most likely to succeed in high school. He went on to have a successful career as an attorney for the state of Kentucky and a few years ago he decided to take a very generous early retirement package. That’s when the real trouble began.

Kent is 5½ years older than me so growing up we weren’t as close but once I entered my teen years he became one of my best friends and we talked on the phone several times a week. He had always been somewhat paranoid but as his retirement date got closer, the conspiracies he was imagining became more and more bizarre. He was sure that his phone was being tapped and people were following him home from work. I tried reasoning with him but usually he was drunk when he would tell me these things so it didn’t do much good. Even after he started telling the rest of the family about his government conspiracy theories, I still wanted to blame the alcohol.

But a few months after he retired, he stopped drinking all together and things went from bad to worse. That’s when I got really scared. He decided that everyone he encountered, including our entire family, were clones that were out to get him. There was nothing we could do other than check up on him and bring him food because unless you can prove someone is a threat to themselves or others, you can’t force them into treatment. Eventually he broke into a neighbor’s house and demanded to know why they were spying on him. Naturally they called the police and after being tasered and taken to jail, we were finally able to get him into a psychiatric hospital.

That’s when the whole legal nightmare of things like getting guardianship and court-ordered medications began. He barely got started on the drugs before his insurance ran out and they released him. He immediately stopped taking his meds and it was another year of hell until the voices got so bad that he was banging his head against the wall and my parents had to call the police. He’s stayed on the medication that stopped the voices since his second hospitalization but refuses to try the drug that might help the delusions because he would have to consent to regular blood work.

In order to move on, I had to accept the fact that the brother I knew was dead and he wasn’t coming back. I did let myself feel a little hope during the last month or so because I thought he had found a doctor that he would actually talk to. It turned out to be a big misunderstanding and he is holding onto his delusional beliefs as firmly as ever. My parents have had to shoulder the brunt of the burden but I know eventually my sister and I will have to take over his care and that scares the shit out of me. Even though I know Kent's probably not coming back, I still can't get rid of that little glimmer of hope that I might be able to hear him really laugh one more time. If anyone wants to help fight schizophrenia and other brain disorders you can visit the silver ribbon foundation at www.silverribbon.org.

Litracy Test

The first Tea Party Convention in Nashville opened up with a bang when former congressman Tom Tancredo said that we should have to take a civics, literacy test before we can vote because "people who could not even spell the word 'vote', or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House." I say, bring it on. I’ve seen enough of those barely literate tea party signs that say things like yes God bless Amercia and Thank you Fox News for keeping us infromed to be willing to bet that huge numbers of white people would be stripped of their voting rights right along with the minority citizens he seems to be targeting.

I guess Mr. Tancredo longs for the good old days before the 1965 Voting Rights Act when whoever was white and in power could decide which Americans got to cast their ballot on election day. I get sick and tired of hearing these apologists for the movement saying that it isn’t about race, it’s about limited government spending. WTF?!?! You had eight goddamn years to complain about Bush taking us from a surplus to over a trillion dollar debt and I didn’t hear one peep. Obama didn’t even get a chance to step into the White House before you were ready to impeach him. As someone who grew up in the first generation in the South to attend desegregated schools, I recognize a racist when I see them and a lot of Tea Party members bear a strong resemblance to the bigots I knew as a kid.

I’m not saying that most of the people at these rallies are consciously prejudiced but they have a fear of “those people”. George Bush was one of them in a way that anyone named Barack Hussein Obama could never be. And the really bizarre thing is that the Tea Partiers are actually “my people”. They are the culture of my childhood. I had my fifteen seconds of fame in the mid-seventies when WAVE-TV 3 filmed my sister and me sitting on the side of the stage at a free Ray Stevens concert at the Kentucky State Fair. And now he’s writing songs for the Tea Party movement. That pretty much sums up my life. Even though they drive me insane, the people who actually believe the bold-faced lies that our sitting president is a racist, socialist foreigner are the same people from church who changed my diapers in the nursery and taught me in Vacation Bible School when I was little.

We’re Number One!

It’s official! The Swiss research firm Covalence has released its annual ranking of the ethical performance of multinational corporations and Monsanto is now the most unethical company in the world! The same company that brought you those crazy chemical concoctions like Agent Orange, PCBs and DDT is now in control of your food supply. From cows treated with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone who get sick but produce more milk to suing farmers for having Monsanto patented seeds that blew into their fields, Monsanto food has become the norm in America.

The thing that really freaks me out about it is that this is so Damien: Omen II. Thorn Industries was going to use food to control the world and Monsanto seems to be following in their footsteps. It’s kind of like a story I wrote for a fiction class in college where a P.E. Teacher is fired for being overweight. At the time, that was a crazy idea but now we have a U.S. Surgeon General candidate, Regina Benjamin, who is being challenged for exactly that reason. Maybe she’s fat for the same reason that most of her fellow citizens are, the factory-farmed and mass produced food stuff we’re offered in stores is full of fat and salt and sugar.

I'm not asking farmers to break the corn habit overnight but if the government would quit subsidizing particular crops we might be able to set up a farming community that doesn't depend on chemicals and fertilizer to make a profit.People have to make a decision. Either you want fresh food that costs extra and takes a little more preparation time or you'll settle for some genetically-modified, factory-farmed mound of food stuff. Somehow I think Monsanto's combo of convenience and carcinogens will win over the public every time.

The Death of Hope

This is it. I give up. I will never see a president who represents me in my lifetime. I’m back to the hopelessness I felt during my high school/college years at the height of the Reagan revolution. I was a little late hopping on the Obama train because, believe it or not, I bought John Edwards’ populist bullshit about being there for the little guy. Jesus, we dodged a bullet on that one. After the expose in the National Enquirer, the 21st century’s go-to spot for investigative journalism, it looks like the Edwards campaign probably would have imploded well before they got their hour of hope. Nobody in their right mind is going to make excuses for a raging narcissist who’s fucking around on his dying wife, although they will for a sitting president whose wife is a little too capable for some people’s taste.

I was guardedly optimistic when the man from Hope, Arkansas entered the White House but he quickly devolved into just another Democrat in name only after bringing the country such fine legislation as don’t ask, don’t tell, NAFTA, the welfare reform act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Obama knows how to speak convincingly because every time I tell myself that I’m through listening, he always seems to reel me back in. But after the health care fiasco, I’m through. If I don’t see some concrete actions to show me that he’s looking out for something besides corporate interests, I’m giving up on both political parties in this country.

We’ve had Ross Perot and now the Tea Party activists are making their bid to be the next third party but what I want to know is when we’re going to have a viable progressive candidate who wants to fight for our citizens, not the corporations who run things now. Okay, I know Ralph Nader ran for president but I think he’s an egotistical asshole who’s only out for himself so that doesn’t really count. A big part of the backlash against Obama is because he promised change and so far it’s pretty much been business as usual with a little feel good rhetoric for the people who actually elected him. The thing that really scares me about this country is how quickly people are willing to endorse the vicious, hate-filled ideas of the radical right just so they can see some kind of change, no matter how hurtful it is to the poor and middle class.