Celebrate Earth Day. Burn a Tire.

Today is earth day, surely a phony holiday if ever there was one – phony in the same sense that Kwanza is phony, created for a one purpose, claiming to serve another, and foisted on the public by an adoring media. Its ostensible purpose is to promote the laudable goal of conservation. Its actual purpose is to promote left wing politics and expanding government control over people’s lives.

However, perhaps one should not be too cynical about it. After all, every other religion gets its holidays , so why not this one? That eco-worship is a religion should by now be so obvious as to not be particularly controversial. Indeed it provides the same sort of ready and familiar replacement for traditional religion that overt Marxism did for the disillusioned of earlier generations. It offers similar spiritual satisfaction and a similar mythology. It posits a former ideal state of harmony and grace, a fall from that state brought about by humanity’s sins and disobedience, a chance for redemption through renunciation and obedience, a certainty based on unshakable faith, Manichean contempt for the non-believer, a looming apocalypse, and, most important of all, opportunity for an easy sense of virtue and cosmic righteousness based solely on holding the correct opinions. No wonder it is so popular.

It is also quite dangerous, because it is a crusading faith, resembling the Islam of the early caliphate more than the tired and emptily ritualistic Church of England of the present century. It is a mass movement, not as large a one as its cheerleaders in the traditional media would have one believe, but a mass movement nonetheless. Such mass movements of humorless, self-righteous fanatics rarely end well and should be view suspiciously by sensible people, irrespective of their goals. After all, you can’t make an omelet or save the planet without breaking a few eggs. One wouldn’t want himself or his property or his children’s future to be one of those eggs.

So all the heretics should be as heretical as possible on this the holiest holiday of the eco faith. For myself, I’d celebrate the day by burning a tire in the front yard, if I had one and if it wouldn’t smell so bad and if it weren’t illegal in my town. So instead I suggest a healthy horselaugh at the expense of the faithful and a renewed commitment not to be railroaded by them.