Ain't nuthin' wrong with my air!

2009-12-07T18:23:00-07:00

(From The Christian Science Monitor)

Global warming: Why public concern declines

"On eve of the global warming summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, an informal global survey shows that public interest in the issue is waning. But many people are taking individual steps to curb global warming... ."

Public concern about global warming declines in the United States because the average American is an ignorant, selfish, stupid ass who is more interested in his 401K, an upcoming football game, or next Saturday's sex, than in the future of our beleaguered planet.

For more than a decade, I have desperately sought escape from growing clouds of man-made pollution that shroud every corner of North America. No locale is clean now. There is, literally, nowhere left to run.

Yet, the "average" man in the street is oblivious to the pollution he breathes, day and night. He "don't see nuthin" wrong with the air and is happy to think global warming issues represent a socialist plot to do something to him--take away his "freedom", I presume.

Where did he glean this gem of rare insight? Why, from Fox News' Glenn Beck, of course!

I believe the very urgent planetary pollution issue should be couched in a perspective Joe Sixpack can more readily grasp than is presently the case.

To have former vice president Al Gore and scholarly climate scientists cite glacial retreats on Mount Blanc and the Antarctic Continent, or increasing desertification in the Southern Kalahari, means nothing to Joe so long as his myopic little cocoon in Middle America hasn’t been directly jostled.

"Joe, you have developed premature cardiovascular disease because of the smoke from that coal-fired steam plant up the road that you have breathed all of your life. The prognosis is that you will die before you are 55 if the plant isn’t shut down immediately," might better get Joe’s attention.

One has to meet the Joe Sixpacks of the human species where they are, intellectually, if one wishes to communicate with them.

(See also ABC's "Climate Concern Waning in US" for further evidence of American selfishness and stupidity on the world stage.)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/09/2767037.htm

D. Grant Haynes