Mad. Madmadmadmadmadmad!!!!!!!!!!

As most of you know, the study of science has never been my strong suit. I am fascinated by it, but I do not understand how it works. So in tenth grade I decided to take what I thought would be the easy road and take Environmental Science. I would like to thank Mr. Richins for my current fascination and worry with global warming, acid rain, recycling, the extinction of the Polar Bear, the percentage of landfills taken up by disposable diapers, the National Geographic Channel, etc.

I had the opportunity to visit an aquarium, dumpy though it was, in Manhattan Beach, CA. They had on their wall a display of several different types of containers: Plastic, styrofoam, tin cans, aluminum cans, and plastic bags. A quick double check on Wiki lists the biodegradable time of the following items: Tin cans at 50-100 years, aluminum cans at 200-500 years, plastic bottles at 70-450 years, and styrofoam will never leave this planet. Ever. So I don't think any of you will find it difficult to imagine me pulling my hair out when Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for Vice President poked some vitriolic fun at the Obama campaign by saying "after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet" he will raise your taxes (I think is how that sentence was concluded). This was followed by the largely white and obese crowd yelling "Drill, baby drill." My other favorite barb of the night had to do with the people at the DNC "hauling back their environmentally safe styrofoam to some Hollywood studio." This insult is, of course, two fold. The first part of the jab is belittling people who are interested in "environmentally safe styrofoam." The second part is, of course, the same old Elephant wail to hate everyone in Hollywood.

I dislike Sarah Palin for several reasons, the least of which is barb-filled environmentally obtuse speech. I take that back. In a sense I feel sorry for her. She came into this nomination so late and so unexpectedly that she probably didn't get to offer up any of her own opinions and got to recite a speech written for her by Bushie 2's former speech writer. But back to why I am so upset by her and her stances:

• She is a proponent of abstinence only sex education. Her 17 year old daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. She vetoed money in her state that would help single mothers. If Obama's daughter was pregnant, the Evangelicals would be all over that, claiming immoral family values, and the dangers of teaching valid sex-ed, because knowledge is power. If you understand sex you'll want to do it all the time! It is the epitome of so-called "moral" hypocrisy.
  
• She has a four month old son named Trig who has Down's Syndrome. I am all for working mothers. It is nearly impossible for any family now to make it on anything less than two incomes. As one Evangelical woman said in an interview in the New York Times, "Sarah Palin is running for Vice President with a pregnant daughter and a four month old son with Down's Syndrome. Not my set of values." Another example of conservative hypocrisy at work. Thank heaven, though, that if Sarah Palin wins she will have a team of nannies, tutors, cooks, etc. to raise her children while she is out looking for new places to drill. Meanwhile, you and I go to work as waitresses, teachers, laborers and try to scrounge up money to pay a babysitter so we can go to a Friday night movie.
  
• I am upset by the pro-life wing singing the praises of Sarah Palin for not aborting her son when she discovered while still in vitro that he had Down's Syndrome. Because, as we all know, every woman who is pro-choice and becomes pregnant with a special needs baby aborts it immediately.
• Her energy plans are preposterous. "Yes," she exclaims, "There's plenty of energy on the North Slope of Alaska!" Let's extract it, drill it, thump it, drain it completely dry. The "alternative methods" of energy were practically an afterthought in her speech. Wind, solar, biothermal, water. We need them all. We ABSOLUTELY need to end our dependence on foreign oil. But we can't do it by drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. It will not sate our appetites but for a moment. We must learn to do without it. It's like french fries, people. They're a treat, not a food group. And as we all know from our spiraling obesity rates, Americans love French fries.

I believe in morality of all kinds. We should be good people; we should honor our families, our loved ones, our land, our bodies. And I will not be told that I am an immoral person for believing that a woman should have a choice about her unborn baby, for believing that the Federal Minimum Wage of $6.55 is woefully inadequate, for believing that thumper trucks should not be allowed to search for oil on soil that takes 300 years to regenerate, for poisioning our food supply with insecticides.

And after this rant, I can absolutely promise you this: I recycle to the best of my ability. I eat organic, unprocessed foods. I drive fuel-effecient cars when I do drive. I do not judge you if you don't, because I understand that life is complicated, busy, and hard. Some cities do not even offer recycling. The self-interests of corporations make it hard to do the right thing. But let's not continue to promulgate this cycle of waste and pollution by putting people like McCain and Palin in the White House. Let's take a chance on someone who can get us back to the Kyoto Protocol, who can hopefully build the U.S. image in a positive light for the rest of the world to behold. Because they do look up to us, whether they want to or not, they do.