The polluted spirit

Yesterday I hit the topic of our local pollution problems, such as our famous feces lagoon and scoundrels illegally dumping waste oil on our fair rock. I neglected to mention the vulgar clowns who lace our beaches with beer cans and soiled diapers (tourists, no doubt, eh?).

Leaving aside the economic issues, there’s a personal point worth making: I hate pollution.
I’ve seen Gary, Indiana, arguably the ultimate polluted hell. Los Angeles, with its tangibly thick air, is a stinker in my book, too. And in Nevada I’ve seen radiation sensors which monitor the fallout resulting from the know it alls in Washington lighting off nuclear bombs.
Pollution, radiation, and even the eyesore of urban blight are soul-zapping elements of modern life. But maybe modern man has no soul, having had it sucked out through his eyeballs by his television set.

An alternative theory would hold that modern man does indeed have a soul, but the soul has become polluted. Why not? The social dysfunction in America is more a symptom of being morally crippled than of being mentally crippled. If an oil spill in the Pacific is a toxic nightmare, then no less toxic is the media spill in U.S. living rooms. The times I’ve strayed from CNBC’s financial news have left me recoiling in horror. George Orwell himself could not have envisioned a more soul-less, passive people being socially homogenized by the velvet covered fist of the media’s heavy iron.

As far as physical pollution goes, we can look at it several ways. Some is an inevitable by- product of industrial progress. I’ll accept that, at least to some degree. I’d rather breathe a few molecules of smog than not have access to cars, electricity, planes, trucks, ships, and all the things they bring us.

We quickly cross into a gray area, though, when we ponder large scale, industrial pollution. This used to be a focus of mine when I worked in the alternative energy industry, and there are a lot of interesting–and competing–factors to consider.

But then, moving along the outrage scale, we confront blatantly irresponsible pollution. I refer to pollution that is not a by-product of responsible consumption. That is, pollution that could have been avoided at zero or negligible cost. Which brings us back to the waste oil and diapers on the beach angle.
This isn’t ancillary pollution, these are deliberate acts to undermine the soundness of the environment for no reason other than malice or negligence. They are crimes, to coin a phrase, of “moral turpitude.”

And here we’re up against the issue of not merely polluted fields or polluted beaches, but of polluted people. We can outlaw the acts, but we can’t outlaw the reasons behind the acts.

And neither can we outlaw the very hatred or indifference to mother nature that modern America has bred. A nation of television watchers is acquainted with nature about as well as a fish is with bicycle riding. We’ve got generations of polluted people, human flotsam riding on the television tide. The ultimate pollution is that of the sprit, and, like all pollution, it’s certainly repulsive to behold.