Lee Pitts
RBC I We’ve become a nation of pompous two-faced frauds. We like to eat good food but hate the farmers and ranchers who produced it. We think food comes from the grocery store and that water comes from the tap. We cuss fossil fuels and yet drive cars and trucks that run on oil and gas. We turn up the thermostat in winter and expect heat to automatically come on as if it was produced by magic. Ditto air conditioning in the summer. The only time we think about it is if the grid goes down. Voters elect politicians who vow to get rid of fossil fuels not even thinking of the repercussions and then complain to high heaven when there are blackouts that last for three days like the ones they have in California when everyone turns on their air conditioner at the same time.
We bad mouth the foresters and their angry chainsaws but live in houses made of wood. We despise miners who “rape” the earth but wear jewelry, hoard gold and use cell phones dependent on mined metals.
A city, county or township sends out notices warning you to keep the dry vegetation cut down on your property and if you don’t comply they’ll chop it down for you and send you a bill. Yet the bureaucrats want to kick cows off public land who are mowing the dry vegetation for free. In fact, the ranchers are paying for the privilege. Using the bureaucrats same logic shouldn’t the rancher be paid for reducing the fire danger?
We’ve gone from a nation that made, grew or built things to transporting, moving and managing Chinese imports and massaging and manipulating money on Wall Street.
We say we want to eat pure food without chemicals and then turn around and buy fake meat with 32 different ingredients many of which you know nothing about unless you’re a chemistry professor. Then we bad mouth beef which has only one ingredient… beef. Hollywood starlets and movie stars go on Ellen and say they don’t want any foreign substances in their bodies and then they smoke weed and snort cocaine.
We’re all for biodiversity yet we want to rid the world of non-native species, except of course the illegals who cross our southern borders to mow our lawns, reroof our houses and raise our kids. We vow to save endangered species like red headed frogs and fairy shrimp that live in the rural west while 97% of our population lives on 3% of our land which they’ve turned into a sterile environment where there are no species left to save. They wiped out all the species in their neighborhood and now want to tell us how to save them in ours. The urbanites dictate what happens on the other 97% of the land because they know so much more about nature than the rural families who’ve survived there for five and six generations.
The animal rightists are aghast that cattle, swine and sheep are humanely euthanized but don’t say a thing when packs of wolves rip the flesh from the bones of a baby lamb or eat the hind end out of a cow as she calves leaving behind the cow and the calf to die a slow death.
The enviro-blatherers and eco-twaddlers use words like “sustainable” while working in “cube farms” and living in concrete jungles where they can’t even see the sun. They think that humanity is the greatest cancer on Mother Earth and that we’re all going to either freeze or burn to death to pay for our sins. They ease their conscience by writing an annual check to the Sierra Club at Christmas.
First they said that paper bags were terrible so they switched us all to plastic and then you had to bring your own bag to the store. Then they found that wasn’t sanitary or sustainable so now they’re back to paper bags. It will be the same thing with many of these issues. When they finally wake up and discover that food comes from farmers and that cows, sheep and goats make great four-legged firemen, there won’t be anyone left who knows a tulip from a turnip or which end of the cow gets up first. They’ll have “Meatless Mondays” all right… Starvation Sundays and Saturdays and food-less Fridays too.
By LEE PITTS
‘It’s the Pitts’ – Los Osos, California
Originally published in The FencePost, 2021. Reprinted with permission.
Post submitted by Wiley and Susan Berthelson.
Special to the Herald Times
