Poverty Is Not Cute!!

Via Lucianne, I found this article by Mary Katherine Ham that makes me want to scream, makes me want to spit at every enviro-whacko in sight, makes me so angry that my hands can hardly stop shaking enough to type properly. How dare they? How dare those pretentious, snobbish glassbowls talk about great it must be to live in poverty? How dare they talk about how charming it is to use a horse and cart, how they are proud to have a horse? Well, in the area of Eastern Europe my grandmother and her family fled, they were happy to have a cow. Because they had a better chance to put food on the table, not because of some environmentalist's wet dream!!

Maybe it's wrong that I feel this more personally, because as I mentioned not that long ago, some of my ancestors came to America from an area very close to that discussed in the article. My great-grandparents' descendants could still be living in a hellhole, instead of enjoying the gifts of freedom to create wealth and make their own choices. Still, there's an ongoing tradition of the wealthy and powerful "bleeding hearts" working so hard on making themselves feel good, while hurting at worst and ignoring at best those whom they claim to care about so much. (h/t Ace.) So perhaps sometimes a problem so pervasive needs to hit you personally.

What also disturbs me here, is that these idiots are not just rhapsodizing about how wonderful it must be to live in filth and use outdoor toilets in freezing cold weather. No, they're getting their noses out of the air long enough to butt them in and do their best to prevent something that would actually help the people in the area. Even one of the Chaplain's reads, the Daily Reckoning, thinks the mining project could be a great investment if it was ever actually allowed to get off the ground. But no, the people there should live by selling woven baskets and wood carvings to tourists. Yeah.

Ironically, do you know when mining did the worst damage to the area? During the Soviet era. Yep, during the socialist paradise that all these nutjobs want to bring back. Considering my trip to West and East Berlin right after the Berlin Wall fell, I can easily believe this. West Berlin was a thriving, modern city. East Berlin was burning brown coal for fuel and still hadn't gotten around to rebuilding a lot of the damaged areas left over from WWII. Not very environmentally friendly to have brown coal dust coating the streets and the buildings. There were areas in East Berlin where nothing would grow anymore due to the pollution. Not the way I want to live. And the more I learn about the evil out there, and the stupid who mindlessly assist the evil, the more I want to fight back to keep them from destroying my dreams, or the dreams of my children. If only the poor around the world could get this chance as well.