Move over red, white, and blue, America is going green. Green
energy. Green technology. Green homes. Green cars. Green jobs. Green
commerce. Green living. Green government. We’ve just elected
our first green president, Barack Obama, as well as numerous senators
and local representatives who campaigned on promises of leading America
to greener pastures. You can color our your future green.
The green vision goes something like this: we are going to live in
a “sustainable” manner and be kind to the planet. We will
shrink our carbon footprints, eventually becoming carbon neutral.
Thinking globally and acting locally, we will stop climate change
and protect wildlife and the wilderness from man’s destructive
ways. We will end our addiction to oil by repowering America with
clean, renewable energy; nay, we will reinvent energy. Our goal is
a healthy and just planet where people live in harmony with nature.
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But perhaps, unlike others in a mad rush to start bicycling, recycling,
and carbon de-cycling, you’ve been distracted from the greening
of America by the many other crises and controversies our nation is
facing: the global financial meltdown, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Islamic terrorism, volatile gasoline prices, spiraling health care
costs, illegal immigration, and so on. They are, indeed, a formidable
lot. That said, it’s time you recognize that a great green tsunami
is heading your way, threatening to wash away your standard of living
and many of your liberties.
Like many Americans, your sense of the green movement may be that
it simply advocates small lifestyle changes to benefit the environment.
But the green agenda, in fact, is much more ambitious; it promotes
countless new restrictions and regulations designed to reorder society
from top to bottom.
And so the greens bombard us with an endless list of “dos”
and “don’ts”: Take colder showers. Turn the heat
down. Use less air conditioning. Dry your clothes on a clothesline.
Drive small, fuel efficient vehicles or stop driving altogether. Avoid
imported or non-locally grown food. Bring your own bags to the supermarket.
Buy energy efficient lightbulbs. Lose weight. (Fat people allegedly
use more gasoline.) Buy expensive “green” electricity.
Shun bottled water and drive-thru restaurants. Use cloth diapers.
Clean your house with “natural” products. Use a non-motorized
push lawnmower. Pay more for “fair trade” coffee. Don’t
use disposable cameras. Vacation closer to home.
All these admonitions have something in common — you living
on a smaller, more inconvenient, more uncomfortable, more expensive,
less enjoyable, and less hopeful scale. And the greens’ moral
hectoring is just the beginning. Green ideologues are bursting with
an impatient zeal to begin dictating, through force of law, your mobility,
diet, home energy usage, the size of your house, how far you can travel,
and even how many children you can have.
You may be tempted to dismiss all this as a gross exaggeration. Make
no mistake: living green is really about someone else microregulating
you – downsizing your dreams and plugging each one of us
into a brand new social order for which we never bargained. It’s
about you living under the green thumb and having the boundaries of
your life drawn by others.
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