It's Not Nice...

We were spending some time with the nephew and his other Aunt yesterday when he asked if we thought 2012 would be the end of the world. He had the same concern in his voice that I felt as a child worrying about the “Population Bomb”. If you’re old enough to remember this pre-global warming hoax, you’ll remember that the author’s of the book were predicting that due to an unchecked expansion of the population there wouldn’t be enough food to sustain us all by the 80's. I think that’s why “Mad Max” was such a scary movie to me as a child. It was my more subdued, better done “2012”.

So as people like to do we started discussing the end of the world, with all the adults assuring Garrin that 2012 was an unlikely date. My wife in particular had a good answer, that I unfortunately can’t remember now. Mine was that I thought our ape slaves would turn on their human masters. Garrin solemnly nodded his head and predicted that “Mother Earth” would be our undoing. He elaborated just enough to lead me to believe he thought there was an actual woman standing on a mountain top ready to smite us all because we replaced her butter with Chiffon margarine. I remember the phrasing because I found it odd. Mother Earth, not Mother Nature. I immediately thought of Earth Goddess or some other Wiccan like term. I wanted to ask him where he had been told about all of this but I’m already known through out both sides of my family as “that conservative nut job, Brian” so I let it go. I thought about it the rest of the night though. It got me angry in the shower as most ideas for my blog do. I could just imagine some aging hippy teacher telling the class that there is a force in the world that makes bad things happen to evil men because they strip mine. That there is an actual yin and yang balance to the world that demands a pound of flesh for every misstep we make. Are there consequences for strip mining? Sure, anyone that grew up in south eastern Ohio in the late sixties and early seventies can tell you those consequences are sulfurous orange streams and erosion issues. I don't think Mother Earth was the one behind it.

So what we have are eco-nut jobs teaching your children a religion. Every liberal eco-nut job I ever met thought that man was the cause of all earth’s problems without every acknowledging that we are also the solution to those problems (the man made ones anyway). If you’ve ever been to “The Wilds” in southeastern Ohio you would be amazed to know that that entire wildlife preserve and research center is sitting where once there was nothing but man made holes for miles and not a tree in site. Mother Earth really didn't have a hand in the reclamation efforts.

The interesting thing to me is that while a lot of the eco-nut jobs will believe in the divinity of nature they are atheists who complain the loudest about separation of church and state. God forbid (pun intended) that creationism should be taught to children. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think creationism should be taught to kids either but I also don’t believe that an angry and wrathful Mother Nature should be taught to kids. Why not just go old school and tell them one day the sun god Apollo will destroy man as revenge for a minor slight by Zeus? It explains global warming as well as anything.

The one true God of Thunder