On April 22, President Obama announced the celebration of the 41st Earth Day. Unappeased, the Earth immediately spawned a tornado that ripped away half of the St. Louis airport, an earthquake in Indonesia, and a rainstorm that kept Michelle Obama from making her scheduled Earth Day event. It's the Earth's party, and it can fuss if it wants to.
While Christians across the world marked Easter and Jews marked Passover, liberals marked their annual ode to neo-paganism with hippy-dippy exercises in green self-righteousness. Of course, they neglected to mention that Gaia herself was a Greek hussy who mythologically created the oceans and the depths by an incestuous relationship with her son, Uranus. They also neglected to mention that one original co-founder of Earth Day was a murderer, that its first backers were tie-dyed socialists who hated capitalism, and that Earth Day itself was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin.
There are several people who claim credit for the birth of Earth Day. The most prominent was Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), an extreme liberal who labeled every problem an environmental one. "Environment is all of America and its problems," he told a crowd of students on that first Earth Day in 1970. "It's the rats in the ghetto, it's a hungry child in a land of affluence, it is housing that is not worthy of the name and neighborhoods not fit to inhabit."
And the biggest environmental problem, Nelson proclaimed, was military spending on the Vietnam War. This was a call for socialist redistributionism, not for conservation of resources.
That extreme position was validated by another original participant in the Earth Day festivities, professor Barry Commoner. "This planet is threatened with destruction and we who live in it with death," said Commoner. "We are in a crisis of survival." Later, Commoner would prescribe a very specific solution to this vague but threatening problem: "Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment. ... Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy."
In fact, the original Earth Day Proclamation, penned by pacifist John McConnell, openly announced that "world equality in economics as well as politics would remove a basic cause of war," and that each signatory would "redirect the energies of industry and society from progress through products ... to progress through harmony with Earth's natural systems." In other words, human progress would end so that natural progress could begin. Signers included noted multiple authors, U.N. Secretary General U Thant, and naturally, plane-hijacking, murderous terrorist Yasser Arafat.
The dirtiest secret of all with regard to Earth Day is that one of its co-founders, Ira Einhorn, would go on to murder his girlfriend and stuff her in a closet beneath environmentally-unfriendly Styrofoam. After fleeing the United States and spending 23 years abroad, France finally extradited Einhorn. Upon his return, Einhorn explained that the CIA had framed him after discovering that Einhorn had uncovered their paranormal military weaponry plans. Einhorn is currently sitting in prison.
The biggest problem with Earth Day was not Earth Day itself, which was little more than a showcase for the smelliest, highest, dirtiest group of college students ever to live off the parental dime. It was the Democrats' attempt to turn Earth Day into an excuse to regulate industry into the ground. In December 1970, just a few months after that first Earth Day, the Democratic Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency, a regulatory agency designed to destroy American industry in the name of greening the planet.
Today, that same EPA unilaterally claims the ability to regulate carbon emissions, eats up $10.5 billion in funding each year, kills hundreds of thousands of jobs, and produces rap videos informing schoolchildren to "turn the handle to the right, turn off the water, twist the handle real tight ... public transportation is the way to go, well, it's one of the ways to keep emissions low."
No wonder Democrats have fought so hard to maintain the EPA's budget. Other environmental offshoots of the EPA include the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement -- the agency currently responsible for the drilling moratorium driving oil prices through the roof.
Earth Day, Newsweek magazine reported in 1970, was a "bizarre nationwide rain dance." Today, it is a government-sponsored rain dance that's devoted to the promotion of secularism and the worship of a pagan ethos that values dirt and trees rather than people -- or at least pretends to in order to achieve redistributionist ends. If we're going to start cutting the deficit, the first place we should look to cut is Earth Day nonsense designed to indoctrinate children with the watermelon value system: green on the outside, red on the inside.