Nearly fifty years ago, I made a friend several states away. For three summers, I visited him and his family for about a week at a time.
His parents were good people, but, from his mom, I learned how a dose of irrational fear can throw a person way off her or his axis.
In an outburst of frustration at public pay phones, she announced her fear of contracting diseases, such as colds, from placing her facial anatomy on phone receivers.
This was in the days before cell phones, and before the widespread availability of sanitizing products.
Did she have a good reason to be wary? Sure-- about the common cold. However, even my struggling early-teen brain quickly figured out that she was alarmed by something rather trivial, while ignoring what was wrecking her.
Imagine a two-to-three-pack-a-day cigarette smoker (which she was), afraid she might catch a cold from a pay phone Imagine someone doing something so terrible to his or her lungs, and then saying that.
That panic about the dangers of pay phones, while ignoring the risks of cancer and heart disease, the certainty that the smoking will ruin the body (and the bank account) is, my few readers, an irrational fear. It's being petrified by something that has a small chance of harming you, while ignoring, often at someone else's engineering, a factor that is far, far more likely to really mess you up.
When foreign terrorists murdered some 3,000 individuals on September 11, 2001, in a despicable act, those in power at the time, primarily Dick Cheney, used that tragedy to warn Americans about the threat of foreign terrorists, while they, particularly Cheney, used that opportunity to undermine, not simply the cicil rights of Americans, but their physical and financial health, by dismantling environmental legislation that saved (of at least improved) millions of American lives, and billions (or more) American dollars.
How good a job did the Cheney/Bush team do at manipulating so many American people? On a door-to-door pre-election-day canvass just prior to the 2004 election, as a volunteer for two progressive organizations, I encountered at least one sap who swallowed the Kool-Aid.
Our mission was to show issues to people, and ask them to vote for the environment, without our recommending any particular candidate. This being a weekday activity, most residents were not home, and we left paperwork for them to digest at their leisure. This particular older woman, one of the few live bodies I encountered, announced that her (irrational) fear of foreign terrorists outweighed her concern about clean air and water. I tried to imagine how any terrorist would seek out and bomb her row-house neighborhood, knowing at the same time what the domestic terrorists were actually doing to her air and water, and that air and water needed by any children and grandchildren.
If you don't think that preying on voters' irrational fears didn't put Cheney and Bush in the White House twice, and help real criminals topple many a fine, public-minded candidate in Congressional races, follow the money.
Cheney, who conducted secret (and illegal) meetings with representatives of dirty energy sources, announced the "need" for the U.S. to construct something over 150 (or, was it 180?) new coal-fired power plants, if we were not to fall back into the "Stone Age." As with most anti-public blowhards, Cheney was simply putting his mouth where his money was, though he must certainly have welcomed the feeling of power as well. One critic claimed that the coal industry contributed a total of some $100 million combined for the Cheney/Bush 2000 and 2004 campaigns. Whatever the contribution ("legal bribes" is one friend's term), Cheney did all he could to repay the industry, the public be poisoned.
Cheney conveniently forgot (sure he forgot) to mention that while stolen aircraft piloted by foreign (and highly brainwashed) terrorists killed some 3,000 mostly Americans, that some 25,000 Americans die prematurely each year, simply by living near--ahem--coal-fired power plants. He did not mention, as researchers like Michael Hendryx have since proven (but which any reasonably observant individual can quickly figure), that innocents living in coal-producing areas are terribly unhealthy, and have a significantly shorter life span (by some ten years, according to Hendryx's studies) than those with very similar lifestyles, but not living in coal-bearing areas.
What Dick Cheney did (and is likely still doing), and what most Republicans in major public office are doing, is helping the coal, gas and oil industries kill us (Nukes are also terrible for our physical and financial health), send our climate spinning into rash new patterns of drought, flood, famine and more, while casting deliberate and false doubt on the solar and wind-energy sectors (Back in 2008, the wind energy sector surpassed the coal industry in providing jobs, and much more healthful and sustainable jobs, too). The culprits include our friends, possible climate-denier-in-chief James Inhofe; Shelley Moore Capito (daughter of the crooked and coal-industry-loving, former West Virginia governor Arch Moore, who served prison time for stealing from a coal miners' pension fund), whom a particular writer would label a "coal whore;" just about any West Virginia governor; Mitch McConnell; Joe Manchin (former West Virginia governor, current U.S. Senator and someone with a coal-industry background, who has been a poster boy for conflict of interest); the comically inept self-promoter known as Sarah Palin; and scores of other traitors-- strong word, but how would you define someone who uses political office to deliberately and knowingly create for his fellow countrymen and women, and for their own grandchildren, a world so unhealthy, and so bad for their family finances, while taking money from these destructive industries?
Call me names for willfully hurling stones at the coal industry, but, for some five years, I made two or three trips per year, as a documentary photographer (paying my own expenses) to southern West Virginia, where I met dozens of individuals whose lives and health, and sometimes land, the coal industry aided by elected and appointed crooks) had ruined. I witnessed the extreme poverty and hopelessness, and a fair bit of resistance, where the industry bragged about "the prosperity of coal." I smelled the poisoned air, photographed the poisoned water, photographed individuals who lost their basic civil and human rights to a political system so corrupt that most Americans would deny it exists-- within our borders. I saw and photographed mountaintop removal coal mine sites where pristine headwater streams are now buried beneath hundreds of vertical feet of poisoned rubble that was once forested, game-filled mountaintops, teeming with medicinal plants, but now an industry-created wasteland. I still maintain contact and will soon re-visit some of the brave individuals who have fought for their land and for their people-- our people.
The same goes for some gas-drilling areas in my native state of Pennsylvania, where corrupt (and, may I say, plain stupid) elected officials have sold out the residents and the land to the same criminal class who did the same thing extracting coal. Again, many of these folks prey on irrational fears of their victims.
Would you trade whatever you do for a living, for the fate of a uranium miner, who is nearly certain to die early and miserably from radiation poisoning; any coal miner, who is likely to die similarly from black lung disease or silicosis (take your choice-- underground or surface mining), or quickly from a cave-in or explosion (Yeah, some former coal miners live a long time, but not very healthfully); for someone working at a plant where cancer-causing chemicals are used to wash and "clean" coal? I think not. Would Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, or any booster of these industries (or any normal human being, for that matter) make that trade? I think not. Would Osama bin Laden have traded places with any of his brainwashed worker bees who crashed their hijacked planes into specified targets? Not likely. That would not help the hot shots' personal agendas-- like living, and having power.
Preying on voters' irrational fears is what has kept the Republican Party in power. Prey on irrational racial or sexual fears to promote your agenda. Con voters into supporting the fossil fuel and nuclear industries, or their lights will dim, and they'll be living in the Stone Age. How can one rely on the wind and sun, so, of course keep burning coal, and on and on, the blather goes, preying on irrational fears. The sun sets, and the wind stops blowing, offer some blowhard billboards rented by coal industry front groups. Of course, they neglect to mention that when the sun shines and the wind blows (which is always does at some time, in some place), energy from those sources is transported to the general grid, as electricity. They also neglect to mention that if the coal industry (where CEOs often become billionaires by externalizing every penny of cost possible as worker injury, illness and death; air and water pollution; public health crises; billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies) and wind energy sector each paid all their respective costs of operation, a kilowatt of electricity from coal would cost nearly three times that of a kilowatt of electricity from wind.
But, these purveyors of "evil genius," (Karl Rove comes to mind) as a savvy observer calls them, have fooled enough people to hurt all of us.
They haven't fooled "all of the people all the time," but they've fooled (scared) enough people for long enough, and controlled much of the media, to keep the dirty money rolling into and from their coffers, and to keep us from living in the healthful, functional democracy we deserve.
Woody Guthrie sang, "This land was made for you and me." It is ours. Own it!
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