Way back in 2014 I wrote about a bunch of totalitarian Democrats who wanted to ban birthday cake in school. Flash forward five years later and the moral police on the left are as busy as ever, working tirelessly to chip away your individual freedoms in the Marxist states of New York and California.
Sadly, it’s actually more common for pigs to fly than it is to find a Democrat who doesn’t want to infringe on your freedom to choose, even when those freedoms may result in harmful or unhealthy behaviors, which I also wrote about in my article The Ninny State. But telling others what they are allowed and not allowed to do or the quantity or frequency in which they may indulge is like giving a meth pipe full of rock to an addict—they are going to light that bowl.
If Democrats can’t outright ban something they deem undesirable under the guise of caring about children, the planet or the world, they will find a way to tax it to death, such as the completely lopsided taxing of tobacco. Enter California’s latest method to get you to buy into their Green New Deal hoax. Greenies want you to support their Restore California Renewable Restaurant program by letting you “choose” to pay a 1 percent charge to support its latest environmental hoax. The fee will go into California’s Healthy Soil Carbon Fund, which will “help” pay farmers $10 per ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere to help them transition to renewable farming practices. See how that works? It all sounds so nice and starts so small.
Anthony Myint, the founder of the nonprofit Perennial Farming Initiative, the group launching the program, told KTVU-TV that climate change is a “massive” issue, except that would be a big fabrication. Sorry Myint, but in almost every single poll of what Americans consider to be a top issue, climate change is never in the top five. India, China and other Eastern nations that do dump more plastic and poison into the world’s oceans are a problem, as is the massive amount of pesticides California wine growers are using. They are poisoning the ground water, but this California environmental zealot wants to charge you a fee for some bogus carbon fund, something so illusive there is no real-world way to measure it. And I’m sure that ten-buck contribution is really going to change the corporate farming industry.
Not to be outdone, New York City officials last week announced that it will become a part of the Meatless Monday’s movement, a global initiative that was launched in 2003 that says its goal is to reduce meat consumption by 15 percent for “our” personal health and the “health of the planet.” The program, which was piloted in 15 schools in Brooklyn in 2018 will now go citywide beginning in the next school year.
It all sounds so good, banding about phrases like “our health” and a “healthy planet,” except where is the evidence that reducing meat consumption by one day will automatically make a person healthier or the planet “healthier?” It’s dishonest because their is no way to measure the “health” of the planet or that skipping meat for one day will measurably make a person healthier. No, the ultimate goal of the organization isn’t to go meatless one day of the week, it’s to elevate a vegetarian lifestyle for the sake of the “planet.” But like all insidious Democratic programs, by just putting the program into practice, they have planted the seed: meat = bad; vegetarian = good.
New York City officials couldn’t care less about the health of their citizens, nor is it their job to care about what you eat. Produce in America doesn’t come to us via the farmer next door. Almost no one believes that. You can bet that almost any produce shipped into the large lunch system of New York City is corporate owned, just as is almost all meat. But it all feels so righteous!
It isn’t that I don’t think a person has to consume meat everyday or that I take exception to a vegetarian diet. What I do take exception to is bureaucrats who believe they know what’s best for us to consume, or even how much or often we consume it, such as New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s “Big Gulp Ban.” I don’t think it is wise for any American to be drinking a virtual liter of a sugary drink, but it isn’t the government’s job to ban a quantity of any soda that you may purchase. The last time I checked, high fructose corn syrup is still a legal substance. It might not be healthy for you, but neither are ice cream cones.
What is at work here isn’t bureaucrats working to make their cities more economically successful by creating job opportunities, reducing taxes, and improving city services or making anyone healthier, but totalitarians who believe they know better than you on what you are allowed to consume and in what quantity. You are just too stupid to figure out that consuming a liter of soda a day or smoking isn’t good for you. Elitist bureaucrats believe that it is there job to enforce healthy habits on the masses.
Officials in Democrat-run cities are also guilty of repeatedly initiatiating expensive environmental policies under the guise of cleaning up the planet, such as in Washington, D.C. where consumers are charged a 5 cent fee for one-use plastic or brown bags. And like other feel-good programs, the charge on bags was to clean up the disgusting Anacostia River that runs through the District. The program contributed about $10 million since 2010 to the Anacostia River Clean Up and Protection Fund. So did it clean up the river? Not according to a city audit of the program. A Washington Post investigation of the funds also showed measurements for success were admittedly nonscientific and varied widely. More of the fund money was allocated for field trips for schoolchildren and employee salaries than to tangible cleanup projects on the river and its watershed. However, that didn’t stop city officials from outlawing straws in restaurants this past year.
Progressive Democrats are employing the same tactics misguided Christians did when they enacted Prohibition or instituted laws banning the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Because they didn’t want Americans to consume alcohol (for the sake of the children), they found a way to use the laws to enforce their beliefs on others. In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was trying to ban music CDs and virtual games they deemed satanic. And just as the Moral Majority was wrong then, so too is Amazon’s modern book burning, where it blacklists authors or books it finds “hateful” because the Southern Poverty Law Center says so.
There’s nothing worse than an addict that goes straight and turns into the worst Puritan of all. Actress Angelina Jolie, who though she purportedly had a problem with husband Brad Pitt’s drinking and has turned into some sort of earth mother who only wears dreary colors and drearier clothes, want us to forget that she wore a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck, french kissed her own brother and was a hard party girl. Rather than finding Jesus, she’s found global issues. Her new religion is being a Special Envoy to the United Nations under the ultimate feel-good banner of “humanitarian.”
I’m not against Americans pursuing healthy lifestyles or doing all that we can to improve the environment. I live here too. However, the dishonest motivations behind a lot of these programs is staggering. Legislating individual behaviors does not work, and the fact that many of these environmental programs cannot even be measured is simply dishonest. No government program should come at the price of individual liberty—it’s still putting lipstick on a pig, and I don’t want to kiss a pig or take it home to meet the parents.
Beware of the new elitist Puritans whose new religion is to legislate your behavior and the environment. They support a woman’s right to kill a child after it is born in a botched abortion, but don’t you dare consume sugar or use a plastic straw. The right would be misinformed in believing that the left doesn’t have a religion, because it clearly does. It worships the environment and the human body above individual freedoms and elevates group identity over individual sovereignty. It cares about “humanitarian” issues, just not the individual human. It’s a new, old totalitarianism religion repackaged in a pretty Mother Earth bow. It’s a gift with a very long string attached.#Reignwell