Summer 1969 - U.Cal Berkeley & Telegraph Avenue. I wish you & I could go back to that summer and I could just let you know how very awesome it was to be there, to be 15 and hanging with your friends, with no parents around to spoil it for you. I wish you could taste the Orange Juliuses that were sold across from the student union building or that I could play billiards with you there in the student union building. We could sit and have rum cake and cappuccino ( with half a cup of sugar) at Cafe Med. I wish you could hear the tambourines that the Hare Krishna played on the corner in front of the book store, and I wish you could read a Berkeley Barb. It was probably the best summer I had as a teenager. But I can't go back, nor can I take you. 41 years later and I am not that person, I changed. I grew.
Earth Day was born that year, thanks to the hippies who moved to the No Cal mountains to live in communes and smoke pot, or who became professors so they could teach at schools like Cal Berkeley and smoke pot. What good have any of them done in 41 years? Esp. Earth Day? I still cannot afford solar energy nor can I get any kind of financial breaks for it. Wind energy is still way way too expensive to realistically use it as an alternate energy. In fact here in my county I cannot even have my own wind turbine because they have to be higher than we are allowed to build. Despite the lies of Al Gore and his band of merry men America has more forest land than ever. The Alaska pipeline didn't ruin Alaska. No animals are extict, even though California has spent ALL of its money and all its citizens money trying to protect creatures and plant matters above people. Nothing and no one is any better off because of Earth Day or Government Environmental Protection Act.
And what about dependency on oil? Has it changed in the past 41 years? Yep, back then it was 50 cents a gallon. Thank you Earth Day for that, who is worse for the people you & the EPA, or OPEC. Partners I say. Why aren't we all riding bikes and rapid transits? Why is the air in Los Angeles still yellow? What have you done Earth Day?
At my house we have a compost pile. We have a wildlife certified back yard. We have no grass. We xeriscape. (Do not xeriscape unless all you want to do is pick weeds!) We have not watered anything in our yard in 10 years yet it grows like the Amazon jungle. It was treeless when we moved in but now it is well shaded. We use very little water inside either. If I could have a wind turbine I would in a New York minute. We recycled before the blue bins. I think we are pretty green around here, but so what? We still live in a land of green chemically treated expanses of lawn. These people hate our yard and especially our front yard of artificial grass.
So here we sit, 41 years later, Earth Day and I, we are 41 years older. I have been thinking Earth Day and you have been pretty disappointing. I shake my head and wonder out loud, how is it you are still hanging around, what keeps you alive? Ahh, I know, I know, it is those hippies out there in California, who came down from the mountains and who were voted into office and now govern our land, and those pot smoking professors who have lied to our children for 41 years, so now it is like you are actually the truth...I see your ways Earth Day, I do...
I have grown and changed and faced reality. And you, you Earth Day are you still the idealistic, ineffective lump of nothing that you were 41 years ago. Give it up, grab your Birkenstocks, head back up to the No Cal mountains and toke up. Take the EPA with you, loosers.
