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Oil, gas, and our waste-filled lives
Every day at 7:25 a.m. I point my bus north on 590 to take my students to school. I see three or four miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, often at a standstill. I think about all that wasted fuel, all that carbon heating up the planet, destroying what is trying to keep us alive.
I think about all the money wasted on parking, insurance, auto loans, maintenance, and the three empty seats in most cars. Then I think about all the wasted time that could be spent reading, writing, drawing, thinking, meditating, or even working on laptops if these people were on buses or trains.
Do we have such an abundance of the precious moments of our lives that we can throw away so many of them stuck in traffic? What kind of living is this? The flashy car ads don’t cover that question. Where is the future in this? Add more lanes, more cars?
Right now, corporations are working hard to finish off the atmosphere we breathe and the water we drink with the Keystone XL Pipeline and hydrofracking for oil and gas so that we can continue to piss away our lives behind the wheel.
If this seems crazy to you, why don’t you tell someone?
JOHN KASTNER, ROCHESTER
Irish ways
Ouch! Describing St. Patrick’s Day as “the most sacred of Irish holidays” (music listing for The Tossers’ appearance at Water Street) sounds so cheap.
People in Ireland don’t go bonkers there the way Americans do here. When I was growing up (in the US), we ate corned beef and cabbage during the winter months and not necessarily on March 17.
Turning former and current Christian holy days into drink fests upsets me deeply.
ROSE (O’NEILL) O’KEEFE, ROCHESTER
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2013.
ROSE (O’NEILL) O’KEEFE
I know how you feel. Last year the D&C ran an article about a local homeowner who lived in a,” cottage-style home with shutters and a water break wall painted shamrock green. At water’s edge is a three-foot-tall hand-painted carved wood leprechaun with red hair holding two wrenches and a can of Guinness beer. No doubt a proud Irish family lives in this home…”
I contacted the reporter and editor on the story to point out that, as an Irish-American, I could tell them that shamrock green paint slapped everywhere and a three foot leprechaun holding a can of beer is tasteless and embarrassing schlock, not the sign of a “proud Irish family”. I further commented that while the paper had previously and vociferously opposed those who perpetuated stereotypes against blacks or women or Hispanics, on St. Patrick’s Day it was apparently just good, clean fun to run a story featuring demeaning and stereotypical images of those from Ireland.
Needless to say I didn’t receive a response.
I’m still not convinced that man has any significant effect on global climate but I do agree with much of what John Kastner has written. I have lived and worked in China and still travel there on occasion and it is very easy to see the health problems and destruction caused by fossil fueled activities. Renewable energy sources as we know them are not practical to replace hydrocarbons and nuclear at this time. We need to get away from hydrocarbons and there are some things we can do. Instead of wasting our precious federal budget on failed battery and electric car technology and subsidizing expensive inefficient solar and wind projects, we should start a “Manhattan” project for developing fusion technology. Fusion technology could directly replace existing plants and plug right into our existing grid system. Another policy that would directly address John’s concern would be to eliminate busing students almost entirely. John and I were neighbors in the city and my siblings and I walked to 39 school (K-7) and Edison Tech. (8-12). John and his siblings walked to a local Catholic school and then Edison Tech. We saved energy and the exercise was good for us. Unfortunately educational policy today seems to think buildings teach students poorly and not the staff in them or the behavior of the students so we move students and don’t fix the problems.
DeVillo McCann, Greece