International People-Hating Day

Google tells me tomorrow is Earth Day, and I suppose I look upon that reality with the same veiled disgust Bill Maher reserves for people of faith. I just don't get either the liturgy, or the zeal, or the tide-pool pilgrimages associated with worshiping what is really a whorish nightmare of a mother--the earth. Think about the unrepentant shrew for a minute: she gives us earthquakes, tornadoes, firestorms, tsunamis, draughts, pestilences, sink-holes, avalanches, plagues, locusts, maggots, monsoons, and village-charring, baby-burning volcanoes. Most of you are reading this in an air-conditioned room somewhere, because the earth, quite simply, is too inhospitable a place to allow for any contemplative work--without shielding yourselves from her heat, wind, rain, and dust. She doesn't even have a very good defense against asteroids. She just whirls on through space like a floozy through the ether, without much care for her young ones. If she were a mother, the cosmic authorities would be writing her up.

Her kids, on the other hand--human beings--are the ones we should have an international celebration for. They build cool adobe bungalows against the heat, and warm alpine cabins against the cold. They selectively breed wild, stingy berries and turn them, over the generations, into fat, juicy strawberries. They turn wild ferrell birds into fat-egg dropping chickens. They carve homes out of oaks and ships out of ore. They harness hydrogen and carbon and steel and send explorers into space. They write symphonies, and poetry, and divine morality plays like "Nicholas Nickleby."

People--at least the reclaimed s0rt--are worth celebrating, not their welfare witch of a mother-Gaia.

When I ponder this extravaganza, I can't help thinking of what I'm ashamed to say is a fellow Stanford man, Paul R. Ehrlich, the father of Earth Day. He's the author of "The Population Bomb," who compared human population growth to cancer and who concluded with these words:

"(We need) compulsory birth regulation... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size."

Since the writing of this book, earth-worshippers have learned to temper their rhetoric, but Ehrlich took off their mask--at the very birth of their movement. Earth Day, at its root, is deeply anti-human. Only the Communist Chinese are barbarian enough to make Ehrlich's desires policy, but the rest of the world, when talking up the "earth friendly," are really talking about controlling human populations, even if they don't admit it. In America, we're civil enough to make child-rearing merely expensive, by burying expensive environmental studies and rat-friendly mitigation work into the price of a home, but we're really limiting our populations by making large families very expensive. It's the same environmental crap in a different, slightly more procedural, wrapper.

I don't mean to spoil your earth day. I just want you to remember that your children, your parents, your cousins, your friends, are far more important than the dirt upon which you trod, even if Paul Ehrlich says otherwise. It's something to think about whenever you see all the friendly little blue globes everywhere.

The guy who invented this holiday hates you and all your kin.