Snail Darters

I wish this story about the Pence family was isolated, or specific to them. I have no respect for their particular brand of politics, but they are no different than the Koch’s or Rockerfeller’s or DuPont’s before them, just a smaller scale.  These are the ones that bitch and complain the loudest about the waste of government, and then leave their mess to be cleaned up by that government.  Then they get themselves appointed to regulatory office, and work to defund that office and refuse to enforce the law completely.

Not for any purpose other than because it does not matter to them that people will be permanently injured or possibly die from their pollution and actions. I suppose this is not about the Pence’s as a rule, but about the state of regulation we voted for. The EPA was an outgrowth of myriads of events, like Love Canal, NY, and other sites that ended up being Superfund sites. Now, we have taken this fever that somehow, the EPA is the problem. 

Regulating, monitoring and ensuring environmental safety is somehow the problem, not the companies that are polluting the world, water and land around them. Even the people that fish and hunt with joy, argue that we should do away with it all. The same lunacy that drives denial of climate change, taints the view of the EPA. Like somehow, all the cancer and poisoning and contamination all over the country is ignored, because the EPA is costing business too much. 

It makes me crazy, the arguments I hear about snail darters and crap like that. But, these same people have lost people to asbestos cancer, ketone poisoning, black lung, runoff contamination. They can’t make the connection, or refuse to. But, they continue to elect people that steal the system blind, stick those of us paying taxes on every penny we earn with the bill, and work to take away regulations that stop future pollution. 

My folks, the people that I come from, are the ones that support this and continually vote for them. The people that have been screwed the hardest, continue to support the people doing the screwing. And get completely unglued when you ask why they cannot see sense. 

I grew up on the Chesapeake in the 70’s. You were told not to eat fish caught in the Bay. The entire watershed passed laws and regulations, 4 states. Working together, and at direction of the government, by the 90’s the worst pollution was gone, and the vast majority of the watershed was clean and safe. These same people that now make their living, or enjoy their recreation on this recovered monument to sensible regulation, are the loudest about the damn government. 

It is not the companies and farms that are polluting to blame, it is the government that tests, reports and charges those responsible for pollution. It is incredible. Yet, let the water at Chesapeake Beach or Calvert Cliffs show fecal bacteria from sewage or farm runoff, or a red tide roll up caused by algae bloom from nitrogen run off, and everybody wants everybody arrested. 

This schitzophrenia about something that is binary, it is either polluted or not, is just another aspect of why the nation is so divided. Argument of a different perspective becomes a personal attack. Then, we discuss nothing. Copy memes at each other on social media. Fume and fuss over one side or the other. 

Companies and people are still polluting, we are still failing to enforce the laws, we are still failing to make them clean up their mess, we are still giving them jobs in government overseeing regulation after they are proven polluters, and we declare it a badge of honor to refuse to believe anything tainted with science. I mean, if someone had to run a test on it for the government, it was clearly lied about. 

Yet, the blood test that tells them they need to take insulin or cholesterol medicine is not even questioned. The same people that test those drugs and make sure they are pure and consistent and safe are testing the environment. Yet, regulation is bad. Companies deserve more room to fudge around the edges. They might hire 10 more people. It is a sickness, that is not about Trump or Russia. It is about our view of the world around us. 

We were taught better than this, and there is a huge segment of our nation that is willfully ignoring what they were taught, over some made up idea that regulation has cost us jobs. We have been at statistical full employment since Q4 2014. Our market has created new jobs consistently since 2010, and we have a shrinking number of people to take those jobs. 

Somehow, we believe the opposite, blame it on regulation and environmental crap, throw away all the science anyone ever produces and ignore the fact that summer isn’t anything like we lived through 40 years ago, personally. We get terrible winters, consistently,  and lie to ourselves it disproves global warming, when the science tells us that it actually is further proof. Extremes of weather are a byproduct of an out of control engine of heat in the ocean that drives weather, winter and summer. 

We think blizzards are a by product of cold, when in reality, they almost all come from warmer than surrounding ocean water creating atmospheric instability. The temperature difference could be 43 versus 37, but a trillion gallons or so mixing uses that fuel for the instability. It is the same source of fuel for hurricanes in the summer.

There is nothing any of us can do individually. But, together, we could come to consensus that things are happening that are not to our benefit, and maybe we could agree to stop it, fix it, clean it up, and hold those responsible accountable, and not make them the Administrator of the EPA or Vice President of the United States. In America, we care more about the profit motive, then the underlying criminal activities. Always have.

But we don’t always have to. We could decide it is no longer okay. We could untwist the anger at the government over finding that a gas station chain poisoned the ground and it is leeching into the aquifer for a large city, and get mad at the corporation, and those that ran it. When a pipeline explodes, we could get angry at the company that operates it, instead of the government for not putting it out fast enough or preventing it. 

The same people that demand the end of government in our businesses and affairs, have no appetite for holding the individuals responsible. Individual freedom is important, but individual responsibility might impact the economy. We can’t punish the criminals because we need them to put more money in the system. We will spend more than the company makes and pays in taxes, to clean up their legacy, and that is alright. It is plain crazy, mental illness. 

It is not okay. And the guys responsible do not deserve to be governors, Congressmen, Vice Presidents. They left a decades long legacy of pollution and neglect that is now physically impacting their “constituents”, and we vote for them anyway. PT Barnum would be a trillionaire, considering the quality of this kind of thinking. We ignore the fact that they are personally still worth millions, yet the state is spending that, out of our pockets, to clean up their mess. 

They manipulated the system, stayed rich, and now we elect them to government so they can do it in a grander scale. Those of you that vote for this, deserve what happens to you. However, those of us that have eyes to see and ears to hear, and continually point it out to you, explain it for you, expose it to you, do not deserve it. The group that supports this particular mental illness, in large part across the most rural parts of America, are complicit. 

We hear that term a lot about Russia, but those “good country folk” that continue to deliver these people to office and leadership are the ones whose farms will be shut down because their corn is full of arsenic from the land. They will have their livestock confiscated and destroyed because they are full of mercury from the water that was polluted.  They will have their crab pots locked up because the crabs are full of MEK or benzene. They will suffer that, and still they will say it is alright, you can’t trust that damn science anyway. 

The same people that plant GMO corn for greater harvest and use chemically engineered fertilizer instead of old school manure, refuse to accept that same science and technology identified contaminates and pollution. It is the governments fault for finding it, or it can’t be right, it is not Monseto’s fault for polluting. The same people that vaccinate and innoculate their hogs with engineered serum to prevent fever and loss, refuse to accept that their wells are contaminated. Testing is wrong or it is too far away from that Union Carbide storage facility. The same watermen that participate in the tagging and survey programs for flock management by Wildlife Management refuse to accept that their catch is dangerous, because there is no way the Morgantown run off could get into their particular creek or oyster bed. Has to be lies.

Then they elect people that reinforce that belief in them, that the government is out to get them, and the reason is these people worked for those companies. They are also victims of the government, so we should elect them to protect the little man. When they continue to destroy and obstruct and benefit the large corporate and business interests, we assume it translates into jobs and opportunities, though none of us know anyone that is doing “better” than 25 years ago. Still living pay check to pay check.  We all make more a week, but somehow the bills for the week have gone up as much as our paycheck.  We never put two and two together.

Then when it starts to sink in, we get so mad or embarrassed that we consider it a personal insult. Refuse to accept that it is just the fact that we are being stolen blind. It cannot be that we were so wrong about all of them for so long. It has to be the tree huggers or hippies or Antifa or whatever else helps us avoid looking at the balance on the ledger. We just got robbed, by the people that poisoned us, enforced by the people that protected them, and left to pay their bill, while they enjoy the same personal wealth they took at our expense.

Anger and resentment are much easier to project on to someone else, especially someone that we do not necessarily agree with, than it is to apply to our own decisions. Scott Pruitt was not just really corrupt, he was also extremely bad for the citizens at the margins and at the most risk. His systematic and intentional deregulation was cheered by the richest people in the country, as they ignored his illegal and unethical behavior, and why do you think that is? Is it because they stand to make a lot more money with a lot less cost from safety and protection of the public, or because those regulations were just made up from nowhere, and had not resulted from lessons learned from past pollution?

Snail darters are little tiny birds, and I don’t care if they go extinct from a personal viewpoint. But, I do care that we do not remove the drainage and natural absorbtion capacity of the land, which is the area in which the darter digs nests and lay eggs. Endicott City, MD. It has been decimated by floods twice in five years, because all of the natural terrain that prevented that flooding is gone. The nitrogen permeation limits that are supposed to protect the rivers/oceans from algae blooms also protect us from creating urban flood channels through our cities.

Whenever there is money to be made, there will be those that will cut whatever corner they can to make it. That is the point of regulation. Not that we should be in everyone’s business, but that we have proven history that everyone does not ethically or legally conduct their business. Unfortunately, now we have reached a point of technology that can cause huge and generational impacts if not controlled and monitored.  Little gas station chain, both brothers are still millionaires, the state has paid millions and has millions to go, for them. And, they get elected to Congress, to be Governor, to be Vice President.

And I thought the worst thing about them was the extreme Catholic homophobia and pretense.  Turns out, they might be religious, but they are okay with poisoning any of us that might happen to live near their legacy. Pretty Christian thing to do, aint it? 

Peace.