Heroes in Their Own Minds

Every kid - well, almost every kid - wants to be a hero. Heroics require super strength, great moral character, a crisis that needs to be solved, a sense of duty, and some self-sacrifice on the part of the hero for the greater good.

Environmentalism seemingly meets all those criteria. If you want to save the planet - a great crisis our children are told by their teachers - obviously you have a great moral character and a sense of duty. Children have a super power, over their parents at least, of emotional manipulation. Some of their more useful tools are nagging and crying, and making parents feel guilty. All that is left is to sacrifice their future freedom and individuality for the common good and nobility is theirs.

Each classroom in America is a nursery cult. All the ingredients for brainwashing and manipulation - soft power, Liberals like to call it - are there. The students are more or less unwilling captives, separated from their parents and families. The teacher has supreme authority and the children are crowded into an institutionalized setting with extremely limited freedom. They are one of 25 or 30, with their classmates happily exerting peer pressure upon any individual who diverts from the path of progress. In short, the individual is outnumbered.

The students must rely on their teacher for all the information and facts, with no resource to contradictory information or views, other than those they bring with them. If the child wants a good grade and to “get along” they must parrot what they’re taught.

The environmentalists paint the present world in gloomy shades of soot and ash and capitalistic human beings as the chief villains but promise children a brighter future with primary color rainbows, birds singing, and cute baby animals nestled against their mothers if they follow the environmentalists‘ agenda. Never mind that Cute Knut (the polar bear) grew up to be Knut the Brute and that his favorite food is cute little baby seals. Too much information for the tender little minds.

Not many kids are courageous enough or even informed enough to take on a teacher, that authority figure who has such immense power over the child’s grade and future. Suburban children are taught from kindergarten on to sit quietly and listen, to raise their hands if they have a question, but to volunteer no comments or contrary views.

Children who “disrupt” the classroom are frequently made an example of and sent to the corner or the social worker’s office. Parents are called into stacked meetings in the principal’s office to intimidate them into controlling their intelligent child’s rebelliousness. One teacher (or was it social worker) advised my mother that Big Brother was retarded for questioning the teacher about the year Lindbergh hopped the Atlantic. It was 1927. The teacher marked him wrong.

Several generations have been manipulated into believing that capitalism is evil, that the planet is in danger, that human beings are evil and nature is benign, and that freedom is selfish. Yesterday’s brainwashed children became the next day’s pot-smoking adolescents, who became today’s voters. This is what freedom is up against.

Cult deprogrammers have stated just how difficult it is to rescue a child or young adult from the clutches of a cult. The ACLU has defended these victims not from the cults but from the families who tried to rescue them. Rescuers were charged as criminals for using physical force to remove the victims from the cult environment. Families had to go so far as to declare their relatives mentally incompetent in order to stop them from donating all their savings to the cult.

If these children of the environmental cult were simply planning to go off somewhere by themselves to live in Rainbow Land, or on some Rainbow Planet, no one would care. The sooner they go, the better. This cult intends to take over this planet, and involve all of us in their scheme to control every facet of our lives, as well as redistributing our money. Oh yes, wealth redistribution is a stated goal in their literature. The evil italists must be defeated.

They begin with reasonable arguments - soil and water conservation. They offer mildly onerous solutions, such as regulated showerheads and low-flow toilets. Having gained the silent assent of the majority, they take advantage of the inertia and lack of suspicion to advocate for complete regulation. You will be crammed into high-density urban centers, living on top of one another, with the guarantee that you will enjoy the common spaces that you share with your neighbors, that you will only be allotted so much water, food, and electricity and suffer yourself to accept these sacrifices for the common, and that you will be a hero for doing so, even though you are a horrible, wasteful human being.

Naturally. I live in one of those medium-to-high density condominium centers. Our list of rules is 25 to 30 pages long. Towards Sustainble Growth brags of the 5,500 pages of regulations they inflicted on a southern California town, preventing the use of lighter fluid and lawn blowers. We have common areas which no one uses, except the most bullying of neighbors who intimidate the other neighbors into scurrying back inside their units.

Riding a bicycle would be very nice; this is a flat town. Only there’s no place to store the bike. It’s sitting in the basement with flat tires because it’s too heavy to haul up the stairs. The town has long-term plans to tear up the main street of town, narrow it to prevent car traffic and force everyone to live in four-story apartment buildings.

Be assured, they will not use the common areas, unless they’re drug dealers. They certainly won’t venture out in the evenings. They will go to work, come home, swelter in their air-conditionless apartments, watch tv, eat foods they hate, and bicker with their spouses.

The environmentalists wax nobly on the elimination of cars and air-conditioners. What do they plan to do about those greatest of all wasters of water and/or electricity - the dishwasher and the clothes dryer? Well, of course, there will be Laundromats that will eat away at whatever savings the workers might have after their wealth is redistributed. But what about the dishwashers? Let’s hear the environmentalists explain that to their main base of support - women; how they’ll be making a noble sacrifice by washing their own dishes and standing in line at the Laundromat.

What the Pill began in discouraging child-bearing will be completely by apartment living. The Sustainables note the success they had in Berkeley, Calif., in decreasing water usage. Berkeley, which is a liberal college town where citizens haven’t had time yet to propagate the species, if they ever intended to, given the inducement of brainwashing.

The Liberals are very unhappy about the push-back they’ve been receiving, especially since the advent of the Tea Parties. According to Glenn Beck, they want to outlaw home-schooling. That is a sure sign that we’re gaining ground.

Never mind rescuing the planet, parents of America. You need to rescue your children. Begin planning your intervention now, while you still have time. Those with teenagers will have a more difficult job of deprogramming their children. Parents who have younger children need to instill in them a distrust of their teachers before they ever cross the threshold of the schoolhouse for the first time.

We may be a little late, but no one can say we haven’t learned our lesson about the environmentalists. Teach your children that the real heroes are those who speak up for freedom.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day.  Since Obama officially declared that Conservatives are waging a War on Women, the battle has been raging.  The center of this battle, the Progressive’s Joan of Arc (Jeanne de Arc), is Sandra Fluke.  Rush Limbaugh took a huge hit for calling her the “S” word.   Not advisable perhaps, but he was right in his point.  One of the definitions of the “S” word is an immoral woman.  Fluke may not be a prostitute but she’s certainly no lady.

There’s a reason men were always thought to be smarter than women and this War on Women is the proof.  Although men are our equals, with as many flaws, at least they’re aware of their defects.  Women make sure they’re aware of them.  Yet women have that proverbial, Biblical log in their eye.  There is a game afoot to transform the world and destroy freedom, and women have become the foot soldiers in that war.

The battle of the sexes is ages old, yet the Liberals have found ways to exploit it.  Women’s greatest weakness is probably their lust for gold.  Where men judge a future mate’s suitability by her looks, women judge the size – of a man’s wallet.  The more money the man makes, the more she can spend.   Going to work is even better, for then it’s truly her own money and she can spend it as she chooses.  The divorce laws favor the woman, who gets custody of the children and child support.  Of course, she has to go out to work then and must employ someone to care for the progeny, so she has all the advantages of having a family without any of the drudgery.

With the economy faltering, women are beginning to realize that they’ve been missing their children’s childhood.  If the unemployment numbers don’t reflect the reality of how many people are actually unemployed, that they don’t show the people who’ve given up, it’s because the people who’ve given up first are working mothers who now have the excuse to stay home and take care of their kids.  There’s something you’ll never learn from the Media.

People need to wake up about the Smart Growth/Sustainable Development/Agenda 21 plan.  It’s not all about the environment; it’s all about redistributing the wealth and reducing the populations of industrialized nations like the United States, which in the view of the Marxists, is the chief evil-doer.  They’ve targeted three of our weakest groups:  the young, the elderly, and the women.

The family is the enemy in their view.  Families that care for their own are a threat to the new socialist structure, where the government takes care of everyone.  The elderly are compartmentalized by Social Security, “disburdening” families from having to care for their senior relatives.  What a nuisance, after all.

The young are easily seduced by hormonally-induced rage and anger at their inability to achieve instant independence.  Independence without maturity and judgment is a volatile mix.  To bring about this goal, the Marxists have set about the task of the juvenilization of America.  Juvenilization is the method by which dog breeders take more aggressive breeds of dogs and mate them with more passive animals until they produce obedient, civilized, sociable dogs that won’t bite the hand that feeds them.  The hand that feeds them, in this case, are the drug dealers and the propagandists who teach them environmentalism and socialism.  Juveniles are taught that parental, authority figures are the enemy.

Finally, the other item on the Marxist agenda is population control.  This isn’t the 6^th century so they can’t exactly rape and pillage their way to conquest.  Instead of bullets, their weapon is the birth control pill.  Reduce the population until it is no longer productive.  Marxists hate productivity and books like “Towards Sustainable Communities” go on at length about the evils of productivity.

So how do you convince a nation not to be productive?  Well, unionization is one method.  The more general, social tactic is to “emancipate” women from the rigors of childbirth and childrearing.  Not only does it help in reducing “productivity” but it puts the education of future generations square in the hands of the bureaucracy.

At about the same time environmentalists were hatching their global take-over plan in Rio de Janeiro, the U.N. was also drafting up the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).  Here is a quote from the World Federation for Mental Health, in 1948:

“Studies of human development indicate the modifiability of human behavior throughout life, especially during infancy, childhood and adolescence…Social institutions such as family and school impose their imprint early….It is the men and women in whom these patterns of attitude and behavior have been incorporated who present the immediate resistance to social, economic and political changes.”

And who is the first influence in infancy and early childhood?  You guessed it – Mom.  Mine warned about this trend when I was a child.

The trick was separation anxiety.  Women don’t naturally want to be separated from their children.  A new mother will cling to her newborn baby most tenaciously in order to form the most important bond with her child.   So how do you separate mothers from their children?

First, you have to separate the mother from the father, so that the mother is dependent upon the government rather than her husband.  Get him out of the way and you’re halfway there to global tyranny.  Give women the money and the pill and the next tyrant will be in business.

That isn’t to say that women shouldn’t receive equal pay for equal work.  It isn’t even advisable that women should have no working skills at all.  If something happens to the husband that he dies or can’t work, women will be dependent on the government.  My own mother fought that battle for equal pay years ago, back in the Forties, when she learned she was receiving half the pay of a new, male reporter, for doing the same job.  She demanded, and got, the equal pay.

When Mom got married, that was it, though.  She had a perfect sense of her priorities.  Family, children came first, before career.  She not only cared for us, but for her mother, who was unable to drive and locked in a most unsuitable marriage.  When we asked her whether she regretted having us and missed her career and the money to buy nice things, she told us, “Been there, done that.  I wanted to try something new – motherhood.  You’re my career now.”

Women do need to get their priorities straight, though.  They need to ask themselves whether they’re pursuing a career because they have a particular skill, or whether they’re working to satisfy a lust for power and money, to compete rather than be partners with their husbands.

Most husbands don’t mind working wives at all.  They don’t even mind sharing household duties when their wives also work.  Dual careers are proving to be a problem in a bad economy; an unexpected one, as employee within my company have discovered.  In some cases, which would seem ideal, both husband and wife work for the company.  Yet one is transferred to another part of the Company, while the other is not.  For many couples, one spouse works for this company, and the other for some other company.  One of them will be out of work, one way or the other.

Even for those of us who are single, it’s not necessarily an easy choice.  The move will mean tearing up family roots, dissolving the family network.  It wasn’t option for me, nor for many others.  The company is not to blame; it was a combination of burdensome corporate taxes, onerous regulations that led to the company taking on unattractive customers, bad drivers, and flooded out homes.  They had to lay off members of my department in order to hire more staff to do the main work, which is, unfortunately, overflowing.

My company was careful in revealing its transition plans to the Media, lest it be transmogrified into yet another “evil, greedy corporation.”  The thing is done now.  Some employees refused the offer of a transfer; others accepted.  The numbers were greater on the refusal side.

Just what are my company’s employees to do?  In this company, you must be mobile.  That means that employees who want to move up in the company are better off renting than buying homes.  They’re well-compensated but it doesn’t do much for their family lives.

Big Brother got to stay where he is, but he paid the price in traveling.  Meanwhile, his ex-wife also worked (with his approval), leaving the Nephew with no one to care for him but his grandparents, who lived next door.  He was a latchkey child.  I watched many such children picked up at 7 and even 8 at night from the daycare provider across the street from my mother’s house.  All for what?  So Mom can buy a new pair of shoes?  So they can go to Disneyworld and pretend they’re a family for a week?

Most families say they must work in order to make ends meet.  What ends?  I do know some truly impoverished families.  Most could make do, with some savings, on one income, however.  Now, they have no choice.  This is what feminism has begotten.  Reproductive justice is the means to the Marxist end, the way to achieve population control in their favor.

Get women to hate bearing and raising children.  To look upon it as demeaning drudgery.  To appeal to their conceit and their competitive natures.  To lure them with the very materialism the Marxists denounce.  All led by a decidedly and avowedly promiscuous young woman who wants the taxpayers to foot the bill for her lifestyle choice and that of other misogamistic, barren young women whose only goal in life is political power.

Mothers and future mothers of America:  the choice is up to you, of course.  The government has no business interfering in your choices.  But consider the choices well before you surrender your role in the chain of life or surrender your children to the care of others.

Getting a Clear Picture of Gov. Christie

In my 13 years as a company photographer, I’ve managed to capture every New Jersey governor since Christie Whitman.  But I still hadn’t gotten the “big fish”, as it were – Gov. Christie.  There were several opportunities.  However, the specialists never informed me in time.

The governor scheduled a town hall meeting in Monmouth County for March 6^th at the Ocean Township Community Gym.  This was my chance, not only to get his photo but to ask him about a certain discrepancy in the State Strategic Plan regarding leadership.

Believing Ocean Township to be farther away than it turned out to be, I arrived 45 minute before the doors open, was one of the first people on line and in the door.  The wait was cold but worth it.  I got an ideal seat on the end of the first row, close enough for a really good angle shot, where I wouldn’t be in his face – and close enough to be noticed and possibly get my question answered.

In his introduction, he said he hoped the press would get a better photo of him than it did last time.  Taking pictures of speakers is a photographic art all in itself.  The first rule of thumb is not to try to take the speaker’s photo if they’re moving or talking.  Otherwise, you get all sorts of unattractive shots – rolling eyeballs, tongues hanging out, one eye open, the other closed, and fingers in all sorts of unfortunate places.  The other rule of thumb is to get the picture-taking over with as quickly as possible.  Today’s cameras are fast but noisy; you can’t want the clacking to distract from what the speaker is saying.

Some speakers are moderate in their speech; that is to say, they measure the pace of their words, rather than have them all tumble out in an existential streams.  Other speakers, like the governor, are inveterate talkers.  They love to talk.  A lot.  Hence, it’s more difficult to get a good shot until you get to the Q&A session when he’s standing still, listening to a question.

Since my primary mission in going to the meeting was to ask a question, I took my pictures in the beginning and put the camera away as soon as I got one or two fairly decent shots of him.  The press photographers took a long time to realize that my side of the room was the better side for getting shots of him with the American flag in the background.  They were soon at my side, though.

But to the point.  I wanted to ask him about the discrepancy in the finalized State Strategic Plan.  In Part I, the Intro on page 6, the Plan states:  “The leadership to effectuate this change must and will not come from the Executive Branch.”

Then, on page 7, in the first bullet-point detailing what the Plan is not, it says:  “This plan is not:

·         A top-down approach to force compliance with a state-wide land-use plan.”

I wanted to ask him which was the correct statement.  I also wanted to ask him about my electric bill, which was outrageously higher than it had been last month, at approximately the same amount of usage.  I’ve been as conservative as possible with my electric usage, seeing that my income is about to be truncated.  Strangely, even with the milder winter, my usage was up, owing to the fact that I’ve been taking Fridays off.  However, it’s one-third of what it was this time last year.  Obama has declared that our energy bills are being purposely increased to punish us for being successful, well-to-do Americans when tribal peoples in Africa and India are heating with cow dung.  I wanted to know if this was what was meant by Sustainable Development and what I was being “punished” for, since I live in a small condo, am ahead in my mortgage payments, conserve energy, and will be out of work by the end of this month?  (I hope my readers will excuse me for using too many personal pronouns….)

The people in Africa and India don’t need heat; they’re in the desert and the tropics.  The nighttime temperature in a city like New Delhi is about 80 degrees.  They use the cow dung principally for cooking.  The SDs also deride Westerners for the fact that Africans and Asians are dying of malaria.  Never mind the fact that it was their hatred of all things chemical that got DDT banned.   The Ganges River is in deplorable condition.  What the SDs want is to redistribute our “wealth” to improve conditions on the Ganges.

They want us to ride bicycles like they do in Amsterdam.  Amsterdam is a cold-weather climate like northern New Jersey.  Unlike the flat, lowlands of Holland, northern New Jersey is all hills.  New Jerseyans are not going to go riding bicycles in the snow, nor are they likely to skate on canals, as the Hollanders do.

When a young adult environmentalist asked Gov. Christie if he was going to veto the RGGI (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) bill, which would punish any company that so much as let a whiff of pollution out of its smokestacks, the governor said, “I vetoed the RGGI bill once and if the legislature sends it to me, I’ll veto it again, and I’ll tell you why.  I’m in favor of protecting the environment.  I do not support your social engineering!”

That settled that.  I raised my hand to bring up the topic of the State Strategic Plan, and to enable the friends who had come with me to tell him that West Milford residents are far from the irresponsible, selfish suburbanites the Media paints them as.  When they told me they hadn’t raised their hands because they thought my question was more important, I told them that was nonsense.  What did they think I’d asked them to come for?  Tea?!

Still, towards the end, the last two questions were between myself and a man behind me with a question about a program for drug treatment.  Who could complain about that?  The governor said that I would be next.  In the end, though, the question went to a young gentleman on the side who’d been jumping up and down, waving his arms to be allowed to ask a question.

The governor apologized but how could he resist such a citizen as that?  Quite all right.  The boy stated, “I’m a big fan of Mitt Romney.  If he askses [sic] you to be his Vice President, will you say, ‘Yes’?”

The governor responded that if Mr. Romney won the nomination and he called the governor, he would listen to what Mr. Romney had to say.  However, the governor asked the boy if he was a betting guy (his mother assured the governor that he was not).  The governor assured anyone who was planning on betting on the outcome of this question, that the smart money should put their money on his still being governor in January 2013.

The Tree of Life

The felling of my mother’s neighbor’s tree is a sign of the changing times, particularly in our area.  Riverdale, Washington and Federal Hills are all disappearing due to ongoing activities of the local rock quarries, which mine a rare granite that is useful in building.  Trees are either dying due to age, or residents are cutting them down to accommodate satellite dishes.

Environmentalists might cry foul over cutting trees down to clear the way for satellite dishes, but then, they only have themselves to blame.  In their anti-capitalism hysteria, they created monopolies for cable companies, meaning customers had no choice as to what cable provider they could choose.  That is until satellite dishes came along.  But in a wooded, weather-challenged area like Northern New Jersey, reception is difficult.  Garden Staters are doggedly determined to have their freedom of choice, though.  Had the Liberals left things well enough alone, as the cliché goes, residents would have had a choice of remaining with over-the-air broadcasts, or their choice of cable providers.

There are more cable service providers now, but the pricing was already at such a high rate, due to the long lack of competition and fierce demand for the product, that people are still cutting trees down in order to get the television they want.

Some residents who can’t afford a tree-cutting service simply allow Mother Nature to do the job.  They see vines clinging to the live tree and allow the vine to strangle the tree to death.  Vines are really ugly things.  Once they establish themselves, they drop their leaves and become these ugly, log-like things, like something out of a Star Trek movie.  I make it my duty to stop the vines on the trees along the riverbank.

Our bureaucratic government is very much like those vines.  Though vines are a part of nature, just as vicious tornados, bureaucracies are a man-made, political creation designed for one purpose – to strangle freedom.

Agenda 21 is a vine that targets many trees.  It’s not just about saving the trees or the air or water.  In fact, they don’t care one whit about the wild animals or the flora or fauna that they admit they haven’t any statistics on.  Agenda 21’s prey is man.  The family of man.  The family, in short.

That is their object in promoting “female reproductive rights” and “female reproductive justice.”  The Liberals consider the family unit a threat and a danger to the environment in general.  Human activity, in their opinion, needs to be curtailed, wiped out even if necessary.  They talk, in “Our Common Future” about the extinction and endangerment of seeds and genetic material of flora and fauna.  One species whose extinction, or at least control, is man’s.

Their object since the Sixties has been Zero Population Growth.  A growing population leads to the “exploitation” of resources and creates “poverty.”  On the other hand, they also admit that growing population leads to increased work forces, increased productivity, better health and better education.  North America, they regretfully acknowledge, has enough food to feed the world three times over.  America has created productive communities and that’s not a good thing, in the opinion of Liberals, because tribes in Africa haven’t done the same thing, and their starving.

Children are dying of malaria in Third World countries.  Of course, DDT had helped solve that problem, until the environmentalists banned the chemical.  DDT allowed Third World populations to grow and prosper and that meant competing in a capitalistic world and that wouldn’t help the Marxist cause at all.

Margaret Sanger’s invention helped alleviate the problem of overpopulation in the Third World, through government implementation.  Here, in 1950s America, it was a more difficult soul.  The Marxists had to create discontent among the female population. They needed a way to break up those happy families.  World War II had created an opportunity for women to break out of the home and into the workforce.  The war ended, and Fifties women happily returned to home and family.

So the feminists began agitating for equal pay for equal work.  My mother was ahead of them by about 20 years.  She’d already been there and done that.  The feminists denigrating the title of mother and homemaker.  Mom and Dad recognized it as communism; it was the tact the Soviet Union used to control Russian families.  Women were lured out of their home and into the working with the promise of riches and equality.  Never mind that the Bible already declared men and women equal in the eyes of God.  Male machinery envy was very useful, as was the age-old Battle of the Sexes.

Women had to do all the work.  Women had to bear the pains of childbirth.  Women had to change the diapers.  Women had to do the laundry, and the cooking, all for no money.  Women had to wear high heels.  Women had to deal with the weight gain that came with childbirth.  Women have an inborn propensity to complain and demand sympathy; the Liberals were happy to oblige them.

No one ever asked about the sacrifices men made, particularly in defending freedom.  Men take the greater physical risk in the harder household chores.  Until women demanded to be released from the home, men had to bear the stresses of the workplace and provide for their families – alone.  Having both spouses work made sense in the respect that it provided better financial security.  But at a dreadful cost to family life, especially extended family life.

Up until the Women’s Rights movement, families took care of their elderly or troubled relatives.  Women no longer had the time or desire.  Their rise in the workplace gave to a certain amount of pride and arrogance.  Looking after their own children was a waste of their valuable time.  Better to hire some lesser educated person to care for the children.  They even deceived themselves that it was better for their children.

Having fewer children meant more disposable income and more things they could buy for themselves and their progeny.   Most modern young women do consider childbirth a painful nuisance and are only too happy to support women’s reproductive rights.  Hence, the censorship of Rush Limbaugh in this matter of the Georgetown Law student, who has been revealed as a reproductive rights activist and specifically chose Georgetown because of its policy towards providing contraception as part of health care.

People don’t want government minding their business, but that’s exactly what’s happened.  Women have bitten a new apple and considerably lowered the value of life below a new car, a bigger house, and Caribbean vacations.  Thoughtless young college students enjoy their promiscuous lifestyle all the more because it flouts traditional, Conservative morals.  Smart Growth planners happily point to studies that say young people would prefer to live in urban dwellings where they would not be able to raise children easily or properly, and where a casual, hedonistic lifestyle would be easier to carry out.

What children are borne are hastily warehoused in convenient nursery schools where they’re taught that man is evil and traditional families are no more normal than any other kind, that there are all kinds of families.  The Liberals think nothing of guiding impressionable teens towards a homosexual lifestyle, at a time of life when they scarcely know what they really are, that will guarantee a reduction in population without the messiness and gore of war.

Liberal progressivism is that ugly, vine headed straight for the tree of life.  The vines roots are very deep, its trunk immensely strong, and its tentacles have been wrapped inexorable around the tree of life for at least three generations – indeed, since the time of Marx himself.

We should pity the Liberals.  In their lack of faith, they cling to a mortal, dying world that can offer no salvation from death.  They think by strangling freedom that they can save their mortal lives.  They have nothing else.  They want nothing else and resent any proof that there is more to life.  They accuse Conservatives of being materialistic.  But it is they who are guilty of the most banal, lewd materialism.  They are luring us towards societal suicide.  When they have brought us to that brink, they will offer us the hand of tyranny to save us.

It will take the effort of many strong arms to hack away at that vine in order to save this tree.  Cut it we must, though; our freedom, our way of life, our civilization, in fact, our very lives, depend upon it.

Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees

There’s good conservation and bad conservation.  Good conservation is concerned with the real balance between nature and real life.  Bad conservation isn’t really concerned about nature; it’s a misanthropic movement to establish global tyranny.

Mother Nature, as we saw this weekend, is a ruthless environmentalist.  A few seasons, she sent a small tornado through New York’s Westchester County, felling over 300 trees on the ironically-named Saw Mill River Parkway.  This weekend, she swept through the small towns of Marysville and Henryville, Indiana, taking out a carefully-preserved state forest, specifically set aside to protect the trees.

Clearly, Mother Nature has her own ideas about conservation.

Last autumn, a rare winter storm blasted through the Northeast, devastating countless trees, including a long-standing tree in the Tree Hater’s yard (Mom’s next-door neighbor).  The storm took off so many branches that the tree looked like a telephone pole.  With that many branches gone, the tree simply couldn’t survive.  This weekend, the neighbor had a tree service come and take the tree down.  Though he is a tree-hater, who took down every single tree on his lot, no one could blame him; the tree was shedding more branches and bark, a sure sign that the tree is dying.

However, he also forced my mother to allow the tree service to take branches off my mother’s tree because they overhung his property.  The branches were no danger to anyone.  He was just exercising his “property rights”.  In Mom’s town, neighbors have the right to tell you to cut off tree limbs that overhang their property.  This pruning will eventually kill my mother’s tree, which is still a young tree.  She asked him why, if he disliked trees so much, he bought property in a wooded area, on a hill, no less; why didn’t he go live in the desert?

On the other side of her house is an older tree.  Mom is an astute tree observer and knows the tree will not survive much longer.  That’s the thing about trees; we who love them also know that they don’t last.

Clearly the Tree-Hater sees that my mother is a nature-lover and is out to prove that he is not and that he intends to exercise his property rights to their fullest.  Mom is an avowed political conservative.  She is also a natural conservative.  During her career at Dodge Reports, she reported on stories about housing developments during the Forties and Fifties.  One developer was clear-cutting a great swath of forest land.  It was easier to bulldoze all the trees than build the houses around them.

She observed to that developer that clear-cutting the property would result in soil erosion and flooding due to paving and the loss of the trees to hold back the water.  The developer shrugged.  When she was shopping for our house, she chose a development where the developer did not clear-cut the land but left as many trees intact as possible.

When my brother built his house in Oak Ridge, my mother advised him to leave as much of the woodland in place as possible.  In building his house, Big Brother observed the tallest tree in front, measuring about 90 feet, and built the house that much farther back on the property.  The tree did come down in a wind storm, as trees often do; it’s top branches came to the very doorstep, but did not damage the house itself, nor was anyone injured.

Agenda 21 communists see great opportunity in the tall problems of Northern New Jersey’s Highlands.  It’s a great opportunity for regulations the region doesn’t really need, and which corrupt local officials flout anyway.  Not only is this area home to woodlands; it’s home to a huge reservoir, and property owners know very well that there’s not supposed to be any building on watershed land.  We don’t need Smart Growth to “help” us.

Years ago, in the Sixties, a local cabbage farmer sold his property to a developer.  The property was clearly in a flood plain; the river is right there.  Still, some knuckle-headed, venal official was bought off, and the first strip mall was built there.  One anchor store after another made its money there, stayed in business until they found the flooding inconvenient for business, packed up and fled, and sold to the next unsuspecting store chain.  A&P is the current tenant, with no plans to return to that location.

Down the highway and down the river, another piece of property that was a lake was filled in, guaranteeing that the highway would flood.  It is now the site of a hotel known for its wedding receptions.  Except for when the road floods and guests can neither get in nor out.

Older residents say that flooding occurred in this area years before the Marxists caught on that the area was a prime target for environmental activism.  The region’s problems are certainly not the result of global warming; they’re the result of a departing glaciers thousands and thousands of years ago.  People did start moving here once the George Washington Bridge was capable of bearing greater traffic loads.  They sought to escape the high crime, crowding, and taxes of New York City and her suburban counties. 

The locals of that time were not happy to see the new arrivals.  No one ever is.  Our development was medium-density, meaning that no house took up great swaths of land, and mindful of the need for trees.  But as times changed, and trees aged, more people took down trees either because they got in the way of swimming pools and satellite dishes, or because they were aged, or because the owners simply didn’t want to rake leaves. Those are the people who should take advantage of Gov. Christie’s generous offer of high-density, urban housing.

There are still plenty of homeowners who enjoy having their own homes and tending their own yards and gardens, and are willing to do the work.  They live here because they do like the wider streets and greater space.  Well, that is until they decide to build extensions on their houses, turning the neighborhoods back into the crowded neighborhoods they fled.

No one can argue that it would be a better idea for the Tree Hater to go live in a Smart Growth community.  The problem is with increasing levels of bureaucratic governments making those decisions for us.  The problem is with corrupt local officials who look the other way when neighbors violate clearly stated zoning laws and accept hand-outs from developers to build malls in flood plains (Willowbrook Mall is an example, writ large).

The problem is with citizens who don’t make it their business to keep an eye on their local governments.  If we don’t start keeping tabs on them, Big Brother Government will.  Big Brother will have the authority to not only keep their eye on Tree Haters, but on everything we have and do in our homes, from our washing machines, to our shower heads (they’re already there on that one; you can only buy one type of showerhead now), to our air conditioners.

West Milford residents been battling their town council for years over a developer that wants to build 400 units of condos in the town when the water table is too low to support it.  West Milford residents don’t need to be lectured about conservation or over-development.  They already know.  West Milford is in the Highlands Region.  So far, they’ve been successful in keeping the development from occurring.

We can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.  Unfortunately, younger citizens have been brainwashed by the Smart Growth initiative into believing this is a job for Super Government. They’ve backed down here in New Jersey due to the pushback, promising that the planning will be done at the local.

That is the key promise of the United Nation’s ICLEI.  This is not a bottom-up plan, no matter how they sanitize it.  It is a global movement to take away all property rights because of a few tree haters who cut down all the trees and brainwashed young adults can’t see the forest of bureaucratic tyranny for the tree haters.