A new feature here on the GiN site…
GiN will be “honoring” those who – in our estimation – complain or stir up controversy over trivial issues or do so unnecessarily to win their point or “get their way”.
The first honoree on this list was nominated by Linda (hat tip!). It is a group who showed up at a Lincoln City Council meeting on Wednesday, August 11, for the express purpose of ensuring the City did not cut the all important position of…(drum roll please!)…City Forester.
According to the Lincoln Journal Star’s Deena Winter, “a parade of people wearing green t-shirts called for the City Council to reinstate the forester’s job.”
We don’t have all of the names of those green shirt wearers available to us, so we can’t know for certain if the Letter to the Editor “Words Matter” is representational of their views, at the very least, we can say the green shirts and the letter writer appear to share much the same opinion.
Mounting such a campaign strikes us as…whining.
Very much related, GiN is also kicking off another new feature – “Deserving of Darts”. We can’t decide what is more absurd, the whining about the City Forester by a group of Lincolnites in light of our perpetual budget problems, or the fact that “[t]he City Council”, Deanna Winter also reported, “spent most of its meeting Wednesday debating whether to use one-time money to restore funding for the forester…”. Look for the Lincoln City and Mayor Beutler to show up on in “Deserving of Darts” in the next day or two.
Finally, we have a parting treat for the Green Shirts, the “Words Matter” author, the City Council, and especially Mr. Cleaner Greener Lincoln himself, Mayor Chris Beutler…
Comedian George Carlin was often able to very humorously exhibit some human frailties and societal absurdities. I cannot agree with Mr. Carlin’s suggestion that we should use golf courses to house the homeless (property rights, anyone?), for instance, but there are some things he could really zero in on right to the bullseye, such as his little ditty I think of as “Save the Planet!!”:
You got people like this around you? Country is full of them now! People walking around all day long, every minute of the day — worried about EVERYTHING! Worried about the air, worried about the water, worried about the soil. Worried about insecticides, pesticides, food additives, carcinogens; worried about radon gas; worried about asbestos. Worried about saving endangered species.
Let me tell you about endangered species, all right? Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control Nature! It’s arrogant meddling! It’s what got us into trouble in the first place! Doesn’t anybody understand that? Interfering with Nature! Over 90 percent.. over… way over 90 percent of all the species that have ever lived — EVER LIVED — on this planet are gone. Whissshht! They are extinct!
We didn’t kill them all.
They just… disappeared! That’s what Nature does! They disappear these days at the rate of 25 a day, and I mean regardless of our behavior. Irrespective of how we act on this planet, 25 species that were here today, will be gone tomorrow! Let them go… gracefully! Leave Nature alone! Haven’t we done enough?
We’re so self-important. So self-important! Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees; save the bees; save the whales; save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all, “Save the planet.” WHAT?
