"Maybe We Was Wrong Not to Keep an Open Mind on the Subject of Regulation" . . . . . - - - Gee...Ya Think??

Sigh . . . .

A large majority of West Virginians think that last month's chemical spill, which left 300,000 residents without access to safe tap water, was a "wakeup call" on the need for better regulations, according to new polling data released Monday.

The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates and commissioned by the Sierra Club, found that 73 percent of residents polled agreed that the state "has paid too little attention to addressing threats to air and water," and felt that the spill was a signal that "things must change." Seventy percent of the people polled also said they thought other incidents like this would occur if efforts are not made to prevent them.

"What we found was this was a pretty big shock to the system for West Virginians," said Jay Campbell, senior vice president of Hart Research.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/24/west-virginia-chemical-spill_n_4848922.html


That chemical spill was a "wakeup call" and a "shock to the system" to the good residents of West Virginia?  Really??  Ahh -- it must be the old "who could have known?" syndrome at work.

One might think that The Gadfly would be elated at hearing that West Virginians have come to the belated realization that government regulations protecting their air and natural resources are important, however The Gadfly is, quite frankly, more chagrined than ever.

The reason why?  Because if it takes a man-made catastrophe the magnitude of poisoning the drinking water supply of a major American city to wake people up to the concepts that clean air and water are good things to have in life, then what is it going to take to motivate these same fucking people to demand accountability for the corporate racketeers responsible for such an ecological fiasco along with the politicians who are bought and paid for flunkies for those corporations?

The Gadfly is not, in any sense, tooting his own horn when he points out that he himself, along with many other dirty fucking hippie liberal types have for years been screaming at the tops of our lungs that these major energy industry conglomerates have been blatantly and criminally despoiling the air we breathe, the lakes and rivers where we fish in and play in, and the aquifers where we get our drinking water from -- not to mention the resource raping of the pristine wilderness lands which prior generations of our American ancestors gifted to us for safekeeping.

And yet nobody was listening.  Nobody cared.

"Oh," they would laugh and point, "it's just those dirty fucking hippie liberals stirring up trouble again - let's punch them!"

Well -- it appears, regrettably, that it required the ingestion of some formaldehyde and a toxic soup of licorice odored coal and natural gas fracking chemicals for these people to realize that perhaps we hippies were actually trying to look out for their interests too.

Maybe (and that's a pretty big maybe) now they won't be so quick to belligerently dismiss us out of hand when we try to engage them in rational discourse when we attempt to advise them that certain aspects of the conservative's business model and operating practices are very rarely in the best interests of they and their families health and well being.



----TFG