Environ-Mentalism

I've lived in this little town (the artsy-looking sign at the town boarder calls it a hamlet - wasn't that a guy who wore tights and wrote boring plays back in 1501?) all my life.
Even though the population has grown and the number of houses has probably nearly doubled since I was in the 1st grade, it's still a tiny, little place where everybody knows everybody.
Or, has at least heard of you.
That's pretty small, people.
Try finding that throughout New York City.

This means that when you're a kid growing up and not yet old enough to drive out of town to find things to do, you find things to do in your own town.
One of those things was going down to the river I live next to and do some fishing (boring, actually), engage in some frog population control with my Daisy Powerline 880 air rifle (much more interesting), and, when I was old enough to get a job and buy things, ride my dirt bikes along the river and around a small pond next to it.

That was the best of all as far as having fun goes.
Why?
Surely you must know why.
Because dirt bikes are cool!
They have engines that go braap-braaap-braaaaaaaaaaaapp! when you twist the throttle, which means that instead of pedaling a bicycle to get from point A to point B, you move your right wrist.
Damn, that's fun!
Twisting the grip and looking back to see a rooster tail (aka roost) of dirt coming off the back tire is a sight to behold, and I still like it.
After a bit of practice, you start spicing things up a bit by doing all kinds of fun maneuvers while riding the bike, and when I got my first motorcycle, this was all I wanted to do.
I loved making an impromptu motocross track and riding lots of laps around it.

One winter day, after riding some laps around that little pond just down the street, there was a knock at the door.
It was my neighbor from across the street, the guy who actually owned the land where this little pond was.
At this time, even though he'd been the owner of the land for 10 years, I'd still have it in my mind that the area around the river and pond was still a free-for-all, like it was before he bought the land and built his big house with the 1,000 foot driveway.
My neighbor, Frank, didn't look happy.
In fact, he looked like somebody stole his candybar.
Right away, I had a feeling why he looked that way, and what it was that he wanted to tell me, but I wasn't completely correct with my gut feeling.

As expected, he told me that he didn't appreciate me having been riding around the pond and leaving my tell-tale tracks in the snow.
What I didn't expect was his reason why.
What I'd grown up expecting to hear was something along the lines of, "Hey! Just who do you think you are riding your dirt bike around my pond on my land without asking for my permission? Huh?"
No, sirree.
What he said was that he was basically devastated by seeing my tire and roost track in the once-pristine snow, and how dirt bikes were a menace to the Earth's fragile environment.
While he was telling me this, he looked like he was about to cry.
He looked like he wanted to cry because I'd shown him how, in his mind, a young guy on his dirt bike can wreck what Mother Nature had done, and once wrecked, it could never, ever, ever be made right again.
Worse than that, he made it sound like what I'd done was so bad for the planet that it would probably stop rotating on it's axis and was probably even visible from a satellite photo.

This was a bit of a surprise to me because he wasn't telling me what I expected a lawyer in the Connecticut legal system (that's what Frank did for a living - he had dough) to be telling me - me, the young guy who'd just been riding around on his land.
I expected to be yelled at for riding on his land without first asking for permission, and what
I got was a grown man on the verge of tears because I'd spoiled the once-pristine snow around the pond.
He wasn't angry because I'd violated a law amoungst men about respecting another guy's property line.
He was sad because the Earth had been raped.

Frank went on for a minute about how dirt bikes should be make illegal because they're only good for wrecking other wilderness across the world, and once he made his point, he turned to leave.
I told him I was wrong and that I was sorry for not asking him, first, and after he left, I sat and thought about what had just happened.
At the time, I thought it was pretty strange that somebody would be so down about seeing tire tracks in the middle of the woods, and I didn't see how it was hurting anything as far as planet Earth went.
I thought it was not what my own relatives or other people in town that I knew would be concerned with.
I should have been told to keep off his land because it was his and not mine.
Instead, I got my introduction to fanatical environmentalism, and it made me think.
Frank was just the right age for this, probably being close to baby-boomer age who was at just the right age when the original Woodstock peace-and-love festival took place in August of 1969.
What he told me seemed very much like what a hippy from those times would say.
A hippy who'd been brainwashed into this environmental movement.

From this incident and others later on, I decided that this environmental thing was just that:
Brainwashing.
Being made to think that you, me, and all of the people we know are destroying Earth just by surviving and going about our daily business.
It would take a lot of words to get it all out of my mind for you to read, but basically, environmentalism to me, stated in one sentence, boils down to this:
Someone with power and money - someone who doesn't want to lose that power and money and who believes they're a lot better than you are - is perpetuating a big lie in order to have control over you.

There.
I feel better. :)

-John