Earth Hour minus one

I enjoy protests which is what Earth Hour was supposed to be as opposed to the fatuous publicity stunt it is. It reminded me of when everybody held hands across America back in the seventies or eighties or nineties, which ever decade it was when Americans were out of their pea sized, drug addled brains. Oh how often I have wished I could have arranged for the last person in line to grab a high voltage line and we all could have learned the importance of being in contact with someone who was well grounded.

Earth Hour was supposed to raise awareness or protest or speak truth to power about global warming or climate change or global cooling or pollution or conservation or animal cruelty or something. (I think I could be persuaded to oppose animal cruelty if PETA would persuade more models to walk around naked in protest. I'm just saying...) At any rate we are supposed to turn off the lights to remind us to stop using oil and other fossil fuels which will make the lights stay off all the time, which would just about solve everything.

Now I love to protest, I wouldn't be what I am today, a bitter, middle aged man without employable skills if I hadn't been protesting during college instead of studying. Speaking of protests, what's wrong with kids these days, sure they're opposed the war but I didn't hear about any coeds gunned down at Kent State this time around. You're all a bunch of slackers! You aren't going to generate many good songs that way, it takes a body count to get Crosby, Stills and Nash off their duffs and writing.

I love protests and marches, its away for you and your friends to demonstrate (Yeah, I know.) your sincere and principled concern for an issue you don't want to waste any time doing something about. You get to hear people no more qualified than yourself lecture you on the urgency of a crisis they had no idea was going on until their basic cable package started including the Discovery Channel. Its activism lite, you don't have to go to meetings with skinny bearded guys or intense chubby women and best of all you can shave. Protests keep police crowd estimators employed and gives politicians parades they can get in front of and pretend they're leading.

I'm not a nut bag, OK maybe that isn't completely true but I don't advocate spilling tankers full of oil on sea birds no matter how much fun it is. Oil is a complex compound we have turned into a myriad of products, there is no organic analogue for Plexiglas or PVC so conserving this limited resource is a good idea. The problem is not that we are using it up at an unreasonable rate or doing stupid things with it, hydrocarbons are one of the most recyclable things around and even its most disposable products have secondary uses. (Think about that when you are picking up your dogs poo, although if you live by me I know you don't bother.) The problem is there are too many people using fossil fuels and until somebody addresses how we reduce the numbers sucking on the straw, pollution, congestion and fossil fuel usage will grow no matter how many lights we turn off.

I hope Earth Hour and Earth Day get to expand into an Earth Month where everybody does without fossil fuels for the good of the planet, ah the bliss of no electricity, no fertilizer, no transportation, no food. We could follow that up with Earth Year and discover the kind of lives our ancestors enjoyed without heat, clean water or a life expectancy. Behold a pale rider? Hell's Bells that's how we'll all have to get around without fossil fuels, it'll be like the best Christmas ever and we'll all get ponies because we'll need them to get where we want to go. It could be followed by Earth Famine Decade or Earth Destitution Century to put some natural order back in our civilization, after all why should Islamic Fundamentalist get to be the only ones living in the sixteenth century. I'm sure the Earth will appreciate it.