April 2, 2017
8:47 p.m.

Do you know that feeling you get when you're a little feverish and your mind goes to strange places? Once in awhile mine manages to make some connections and draw conclusions that actually make sense once I come back to myself.

Okay, not often, but, hey! Sometimes you get a little lucky, right?

See, the last few things I remember reading before I went a little fever-nuts was all the plans the new administration has for dismantling the EPA as we have known it for years.

It occurred to me that some of these fools might be considering their moves "nostalgic". They want to return to the "good old days".

I'm as nostalgic as the next guy. Yeah, you're right, I'm probably more nostalgic than the next guy, Which qualifies me to say that what they're striving to achieve is not nostalgia. The world they want to go back to is not "good old" anything.

Here's what I think:

Nostalgia is a longing for the good things in our own pasts. The feeling we had when being held on a parent's lap, listening to a favorite story for the hundredth time. The smell of your sheets after they'd hung on the clothesline in the sunshine all day. Laughing in the kitchen with your siblings while you work together making Christmas popcorn balls. Sitting around the campfire, strumming a guitar and singing.

It's not the memory of driving down the highway and watching the garbage blow across the road in front of the car. It's not memories of taking trash off the fishing line when you had hoped that the pull you felt when you started reeling it in was actually a fish. It's not the smell of garbage burning.

I grew up in a small town where you'd think that pollution, even in the 1970's, wouldn't be that much of an issue. It was, though. I remember garbage laying on the streets. I remember the smell of the dump on burn days. I remember soda cans floating down the river I fished in, broken bottles on the shore line, paper bags in the bushes.

And I remember when it all started to change. Litter laws, burning laws, all the things that cleaned up my little corner of the world and made it better.

There was a commercial that played quite often on television in those days, one that affected me deeply. It was a Native American man, walking or in a canoe in various places around the country, looking at the devastation left in the wake of our daily lives: air so dirty you couldn't see the color of the sky, garbage infested water, trash in the road. He turns to face the camera, and you see the tear roll down his leathered face. God, it was a touching testament to the destruction we were causing in our wakes. I was very young the first time I saw it, and it's permanently lodged in my brain.

Hey, I found it on YouTube. Here ya go!

https://youtu.be/j7OHG7tHrNM

How could anyone want for this country to return to that state of being?

I grew up in Wyoming, and that got messy. Naturally, cities were much worse. We visited Denver about once a year when I was young, and I'm not so old that I've forgotten how smoggy it often was there--and this was before it grew so big and traffic congested. The air there now isn't perfectly clear; I'd never make a claim like that. But it is considerably better now than it was then.

Also, the freeways are clean, the city streets are clean, and that didn't used to be the case.

Things improved in this country, starting in 1970 when President Richard Nixon signed a bill to start what became the EPA. The USA celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Later that year--December 2, 1970, in fact, the EPA was officially established.

I'm old enough to remember before and after the EPA formation--yeah, I was 10, but ask anyone who knows me: I remember things. I remember watching the news and seeing a river on fire! Man, when water is so dirty it can burn, that's a problem. I just looked it up, and that was the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, in 1969. See? I remember stuff, and thanks to the internet I can look it up and verify that I didn't just make it up.

I did that with the commercial, too; did you happen to notice that? Thanks, internet.

Anyway, it really bugs me knowing that a lot of these politicians who want to do away with the agency who put a stop to so many things that led to burning rivers, smog too thick to see the sky through and trash-littered streets are also old enough to remember what it was like before and after the EPA was established--and they want to do away with it anyway!

What's wrong with this picture? How did it come to pass that "We, the People" elected these so-called leaders just so they could turn around and rob our children and grandchildren of clean air, clean water and clean cities and towns, streets and highways?

It really, really just makes me sick.

Speaking of sick--what about people with asthma and COPD? What are we going to tell them when the EPA is dismantled? And at some point, the number of individuals with those problems will increase to astronomical levels.

Breathing won't be the only health problem, either. I don't even have the heart to make a list of all the potential problems.

I read that they've mentioned having environmental issues handled by the states. So, let's say Wyoming implements super-strong anti-pollution laws, for example. But neighboring states don't do the same. Well, the wind blowing through those states isn't going to stop at the border, people. Rivers run through multiple states; if the same laws do not apply in each state, the "clean" states are still going to be affected by the messes in up-river "dirty" states.

This is just not going to work!

This is not "nostalgia", or wanting to return to "good old days". This is literally taking backward steps into a past that was destructive and dangerous, a past that led us to form the EPA in the first place.

You want nostalgia? Bake your own bread and hang your sheets on the line on a sunny day. Inhale all the good smells. Read a well-loved book to a child in your life and tell them how your mum used to read it to you. Put on an old Elvis tune and sing along.

Don't burn trash in your yard and throw your McDonald's bag out the window! Don't allow businesses to dump waste into our rivers.

Just...don't!

I swear to God, I feel like I've been shoved into an alternate reality.

Someone please stop the madness.
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April 3, 2017
12:55 a.m.

Whatever happened to my light and happy-go-lucky blog?

Sigh.

I know I get a little preachy sometimes. Sorry. Me Thinks. Sometimes my thoughts are not happy and light.

Darn it.
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I've been off-and-on sick all day, and I'm tired now, even though I've done nothing much but lay around today catching up on a few shows and writing these few lines.

I'll catch you later after I attempt to catch some Zs.

Good night!