There's no safe space anymore, it seems.
Even in the curtained dark of your bedroom on a quite weekend morning, the outrages come screeching at you, wearing you down and out.
The kids slept while the coffee brewed and we laid there relishing the peace, until I made the mistake of turning on the television and tuning into the local morning news.
Some fresh-scrubbed comely face brought us the story: our state's putative Department of Environmental Conservation had issued new "guidelines" regarding hyrdofracking, guidelines that make it likely the Empire State will eventually allow the process.
Happy happy joy joy!
The newsreader noted that proponents of this wonderful process say it will prove "lucrative" and that it will bring the proverbial "much-needed jobs" to our economically depressed upstate region. Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Jobs." "Economic Growth." "Prosperity." The usual bullshit. It'll be lucrative, that's true. For a few bastards. For the rest of us, it probably won't end well.
Attempting to sooth the savage beast of public concern over this, the DEC will graciously recommend that hyrdofucking not occur near important watersheds or on state lands. But then, well, this is America, after all, and we know who runs things around here. If the industry ultimately decides that they can make a few extra bucks by hydrofucking on top of watersheds, state-owned lands, family farms, kiddie pools, or wherever else they deem fit, well, that's what will ultimately happen.
My wife turned to me, with a bit of fury in her eyes, and said, I thought the Assembly banned this last year?
Assembly, Shamebly, I said. Patterson overturned it, and if you thought Cuomo would ever rule in favor of the environment and public safety over energy companies, well, I dunno what to tell you.
Do you know how bad hydrofracking is? She asked.
I just wanted to get up and pour a cup of coffee. I didn't feel like talking about it, to be honest with you. Between working for a living and raising kids, sometimes I'm too tired to think about this shit anymore. Pretty much everything I was raised to believe in, which I suppose you could summarize most pithily in the simple phrase "and justice for all" has been stomped, pissed, and shat upon pretty much uninterruptedly for the past forty years or so. It gets a little old after awhile. Sometimes a man just wants to lay in bed and drink a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning before his kids wake up demanding breakfast.
We gotta move, she said.
What?
We gotta move. We got kids. Do you know how bad this is? Do you know what they do? Have you seen what's happening in Pennsylvania?
Well, actually, yeah, I do. I'm well-versed on the subject, actually. I know that hyrdofucking is patently ridiculous, that it's an act of environmental degradation that, in the overall scheme of things, yields pitifully small amounts of natural gas. I know the only reason it's even being considered is that our society is in the death-rattle stages of our fossil fuel addiction and now that we've drained all the easy-to-get-at sugar water, we're desperately scrounging around for anything we can get our hands on. We're desperate to keep The American Way of Life going at all costs, we're addicts shaking the couch cushions hoping a few quarters and dimes come rattling out onto the living room floor. We're all in, we're not gonna quit, we're not going to rehab, we're not gonna transition to some sort of green energy valhalla, no, we're sucking on a straw with all our might trying to drain a few last sips out of mother earth and we don't really give a flying fuck who or what we invade, bomb, maim, kill, or poison to get those last few ounces.
I know how bad it is.
Well, I ain't goin' anywhere, baby, I said. Where we gonna go? We got no money and everyplace is a cesspool anyway. Where we gonna find some pure land to live on? Nothing's regulated anymore, there's shit everywhere. Six o'one, half dozen of the other.
Did you know they pump tons of water and chemicals into the ground, she asked. It breaks up the rock and frees up the gas.
I know, I said.
But what do you think happens to those chemicals? The chemicals cause cancer! They use ungodly amounts of water to get at this stuff. What do you think happens to the water?!?! You think it just sits there? Don't you know it's going to move through aquifers, it's going to get into the water supply, you think that it's going to just sit there and not move?
I didn't say it wouldn't. I didn't say it's not bad. I just said there's no point in moving. Water poisoned by hyrdofucking will get us here, water poisoned by something else will get us somewhere else. The only difference is, somewhere else we got none of our friends, nowhere to live, and no one to help us with the kids.
There's nowhere to go. Nowhere free from the predations of plutocracy. Oh, I will kick and scream bloody murder about all this to whatever governmental bodies seem necessary, I will nudge everyone I know to do the same, in the hope that sanity will prevail for a change.
But I'm not counting on it.