Gary Berg-Cross
Earth Day (ED) is, as they say, a 2nd chance
to the wearing of the green in Spring. It’s
celebrated in many ways and not just on the 22nd. There is a nice spill
over for working folks into the weekend with Green events. And you can find any
number of
Inspirational
Quotes for Earth Day. A favorite for the Deist crowd might be Frank Lloyd
Wright’s:
I believe in God, only I spell it
Nature.
Some years ago Yahoo music has its Top 10 Earth Day Songs:
Top 10 Earth Day Songs
It’s
a good list although what about Pete Seeger singing Garden Song
(Inch by inch)
Since this is a
day to raise children’s consciousness there are ones
just for children with some good values, if some take a religious tone
about god’s creatures.
I like the Celebrate Earth
Day in Images that Google provided along with its Animated Google Doodle.
But to all of these joyful connection there are a few
suffers out there since Earth Day seems too secular a holiday celebration. The New
America site had a disgruntled Bob Adelman who started out noting that, “some consider it (earth day)the most holy of
secular celebrations, the culmination of more than four decades of
indoctrination of the theme that it’s moral to force people to go green.”
Yep, and his analysis provided
this revelation for the selection of the April 22nd ED date.
Various theories are extant
about why April 22 instead of March 20, including trying to set the date during
spring break, avoiding true religious holidays such as Easter and Passover,
while honoring green believers. One of them, conservationist (not an
“environmentalist” by today’s definition) John Muir, was born the day before,
132 years earlier, on April 21, 1838.
Perhaps more
conveniently, April 22, 1970 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir
Lenin, the first totalitarian to inflict his own view of Earth Day onto the
hapless citizens of the Soviet Union. Called a “subbotnik,” the first day of
enforced cleaning of streets and public parks occurred on April 12, 1919.
Wow. Shades of
conspiracy and the very Jewish Bob Adelman commiserates with Steven Landsburg who complained that his four-year-old daughter
was being subjected in public school to the indoctrination without proof.
Here’s the Landsburg scree:
At the age of four, my daughter earned her
second diploma. When she was two, she graduated with the highest possible
honors from the Toddler Room at her nursery school in Colorado. Two years later
she graduated from the preschool of the Jewish Community Center, where she
matriculated on our return to New York State.
At the graduation ceremony, titled Friends
of the Earth, I was lectured by four- and five-year-olds on the importance of
safe energy sources, mass transportation, and recycling. The recurring mantra
was "With privilege comes responsibility" as in "With the
privilege of living on this planet comes the responsibility to care for
it."
Of course, Thomas
Jefferson thought that life on this planet was more an inalienable right than a
privilege, but then he had never been to preschool.
I think
I know what side of this issue the Deist-like and naturalist Jefferson would
have been on. As a fiddler he’s be playing some of the songs listed above and didn’t
Jefferson say this?
“Cultivators of the earth are
the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent,
the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its
liberty and interests by the most lasting bands”
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Thomas Jefferson |
