Political Extremes

Before you start thinking I’m some kind of anti-environment, pro-industrial pollution, conservative nutcase, let’s clear up a few things. Modern political rhetoric has generally lumped everyone into two groups. The liberal, left, Democrats are supposedly “pro environment”, while the conservative, right, Republicans are labeled as “anti-environment”. This political media segregation is simply not true. My travels have exposed me to a lot of people from each of these groups and what I have found is that the vast majority of folks are somewhere in the middle of all this on most issues. It is but a few key issues that tend to cause a person to lean one way or the other in the right-left spectrum. Generally these issues are things held close to the person in question, whether it be 2nd Amendment gun rights or a woman’s right to an abortion, there is typically only a couple polarizing beliefs that dictate how the average American votes their conscience.

Of course the major political party establishments do not just sit by and wait for people to show up on their side. They are in a constant battle to sway voters to their side and they spend millions of dollars doing it. Most of that money comes from the extremists within each camp including corporations, rich people, and lobby groups with a vested interest in having a particular party win control of the government. And they use that money to try and sway the middle ground over to their side. The target is the little people who generally don’t have any vested interest in who the controlling party is. But the politicians always come up with a way to make the little guy think that one party or the other is the root of all evil and not voting against that party will be the demise of all that person knows. Most of this stuff is lies or blatant over exaggerations.

Unfortunately, there is no simple fix for this system. We are currently living in a two party system. Both parties have generally left their constituents behind in the battle to gain power over the other party. While I align myself much more with one party over the other, I am not a blind follower by any means. Most of you are the same way with your respective party affiliations. Which party you currently claim, or what party I claim, is not important here. Most will recognize which side I vote with as you read through my political musings, but please realize that I make an effort to read and understand all aspects of the debate topic at hand. For me if often comes down to which side will do the least harm to my way of life as there is rarely a perfect answer proposed by either side.

So, with that in mind, I’ve started this online book by bringing up some environmental stuff. The environment is a very polarizing subject. It doesn’t need to be. I don’t know of very many people who want us, the human race, to destroy our little planet Earth. Granted, there are some self-centered folks around who don’t care one bit about the environment. There are others who care so much about it that they feel people in general are the worst thing for the planet. These are the extremists of the two sides, and by definition, the extremists are the minority. Most folks will be somewhere closer to common sense.

At the start of the environmental movement, there were valid concerns about the way humans were treating the planet. There were industrial companies taking the cheap and easy way out and dumping toxic pollutants into the air, ground, and waterways. There were lots of people who didn’t give a second thought to tossing trash out the window of the car. Due to every increasing production of disposable “convenience” products, there was more trash being generated and lots of waste. The amount of pollution was increasing to the point where it was affecting the health of our ecosystem. People started to realize this and voiced concern. Government slowly reacted by making laws and regulating industries who were contributing the most toxic pollution. Over a couple decades, we cleaned up our act. There are countless industrial regulations including government and citizen oversight. New government departments at local, state, and federal levels forced industry to cut pollution. The process worked and the environmentalists of the 60s and 70s won the battle.

The general public in this time shifted their beliefs from not caring about the environment at all, to a balanced view of the environment. Basically we created a new middle ground on the topic. But once we had a good handle on cleaning things up, the extremist positions for the environment also shifted further to the left. Rule one is that you can never make everybody happy all the time. So, the extremists, by their very nature, now must go out of their way to try and find new hot topics and new battles to fight. And there is a very important reason why; money and power.

Here is an interesting aspect of fighting an extremist battle against the establishment; it takes money to broadcast the message. It takes people to make and distribute the message. These people get together and form structured organizations to facilitate this. Under the misnomer of a non-profit organization, they recruit membership of thousands of people to support the fight. Most folks erroneously believe that a non-profit corporation doesn’t make any money. That is very much incorrect. They don’t make a corporate profit from the sale of goods or services that can then be paid to the shareholders. But they can make money to cover the expenses of operation. The people who work for a non-profit still get paid a salary for their work. Some of the leaders in these non-profits make a lot of money through salary. Money that is collected from the membership and the general public in the form of donations to the cause.

So after the first big environmental movements in the 60s and 70s, these groups found out they could make a very good living by persuading the public that there was a cause worth sending them money to fight. If they were to successfully fix the problems get the government to make the regulations, and get the target industry to clean itself up, they would find that they are out of a job. So, they move on to find a new crisis to fight and keep the paychecks rolling in. In the beginning, many of the causes were worthy, but after awhile they had to start exaggerating and inventing new causes in order to keep people on board.

Now fast forward to the 90s and the proliferation of the publicly accessible Internet. The World Wide Web and email now allowed a new option for cheap, mass media contact with the world. Where it cost lots of money to put together mailings that arrived in your post office box, we were now on the verge of massive proliferation of ideas without much expense. The combination of more members and less expense meant more money for extremist groups. In the last few years there has been an explosion in the number of environmental causes and groups that claim to be trying to solve them. As always, the establishment that these groups are fighting is slow in responding with the same vigor.

There are a couple environmentalist groups that have email lists that I subscribe to. I generally do not support most of their causes, but I read what they put forth in their frequent newsletters in order to stay on top of their point of view. I have worked for the industries that these groups are fighting against, so I do have personal knowledge of what is actually happening on the other side of the debate. From what I see, the industry side pretty much ignores what it put out against them, while the environmentalist groups are not willing to even consider an opposing point of view.

I once engaged in an online discussion with the leaders of one particular animal rights group a few years ago. The president of that organization jumped in at one point along with a few other talking heads from the staff. As always, I made every attempt to write civil, factual articles that pointed out how certain official opinion articles on their website were misleading and in some cases citing incorrect facts about the topics at hand. At the time, these people were appearing in the media, writing letters to newspapers, and being interviewed on news shows. They were nice enough to post some of my own letters in opposition on their website’s discussion boards along with their rebuttals. What is unfortunate is that they did not directly debate the points I made, instead they rehashed the same information I challenged and then used personal attacks against me to try and discredit anything I said. As their discussion boards were moderated, they always held my letters for a couple days while they wrote their responses. Then they posted both at the same time so that the counter piece could not stand alone for any general membership discussion. Any follow up posting on my part was then ignored for any particular topic. After allowing posting from me on only three topic boards, I was then blacklisted and no further discussion from me was even acknowledged. It was quite an eye-opener as to how closed-minded these people really were to any debate over the topics.

I now have my own discussion board right here. The blog format allows for anyone on the planet to post comments about my articles. I encourage anyone to do so. The internet is an amazing testament to the pen being mightier than the sword and the freedom of speech. While the nature of Blogger allows the owner to moderate comments, I will never do so. I encourage fully open and honest debate of the topics at hand. And I will gladly respond to any comment which raises a point that we can discuss. It may take a few days for me to do my own research, but I will respond as warranted, even if the comments were posted by my own sister, who generally holds opposing viewpoints to mine.

The lesson for today is simple. Keep an open mind to all sides of the debate. Realize that much of the extreme points from both sides are driven by money and power. They should not be taken at face value without doing further research. The real solutions usually reside somewhere closer to the middle than either side is willing to admit. And finally, when reading through the points I make, don’t make the mistake of inserting other points that the side you think I’m taking has published. If I don’t explicitly state a point in my article, then I am avoiding the discussion of that issue for a reason. It may be that I don’t agree with that particular point or that I’m saving that discussion for a future installment. These articles already end up rather lengthy and many points need to be broken down further than I want to go in a single sitting. So check back later.