Back by Popular Demand

I know many of you have been anxiously awaiting my next blog post, since the last one was a mere five months ago. Well wait no more, my friends! I'm fired up, and I'm gonna tell you about it.

I've been contemplating the term "misanthrope" and how it might be starting to apply to me. It seems I have become very frustrated with the selfishness/self-serving attitude that seems to prevail in our culture that I am becoming generally miffed with the human race (except of course for me and people I happen to like). What is it with people making it all about them, especially when they know that by benefiting themselves they will be causing much more damage to the rest of the world??

Case in point: I saw a nature show today where a polar bear starved to death on camera because there was not enough ice for him to use as a hunting platform. He got so hungry that, in an act of desperation, he tried to kill a two-ton walrus. Well that didn't work, no surprise, and the last we saw of the poor boy was him falling asleep and the narrator saying he was going to starve to death.

I don't need to tell you, this broke my heart. I wanted to go out there with a bit white styrofoam block, pull him up on it, and take him to the prime seal-hunting grounds. Does this make me a bleeding heart? Probably. Too much of a softy? Guilty, especially when it comes to animals. But I digress.

This next made me think of Melvin Neufeld, the Kansas legislator who is fighting to get another coal-fired power plant built in our state in the exact area where wind energy is among the best in the world: Western Kansas. It makes me sick what people like Neufeld are doing: he has conceded the point that coal power causes global warming, going so far as to say that global warming is a good thing because it will allow longer growing season of Kansas crops. Neufeld is doing this because he's getting money from the power company to keep him in the legislature, and because he thinks it will bring in maybe 1,000 jobs.

But at what cost? Does Neufeld not care that putting in this old-school CO2 belching technology is literally killing our planet's animal diversity? Apparently not. It makes me want to throw Neufeld to that starving polar bear, which I think would be a win-win: the polar bear would have some nourishment, and we would be rid of Neufeld. Unfortunately, that polar bear is probably long since dead, and I'm not sure Neufeld would be much nourishment for anything.

Did I say fired up? That may be an understatement. As a litigator, it may be that my adversaries are taking such ridiculous positions that I'm getting tired of people being any combination of stupid, irresponsible, and selfish. Whatever it is, it's got me here typing out my first blog post in the last five months.