The Moral Center Is Green

[He continues to lose.]

I see a man coming toward me, offering salvation, if I only believe, if I just have the courage. Follow me, he says, though not exactly. I have a moral to place on your shoulders; my burden is heavy as coal, as easy as a bag of fluorescent lights. Take up your carbon cross and follow me. For I have a world I want you to make colder, harder. I promise you can do this, for this is no catastrophe. It is an opportunity. The fields are white, ready for harvest. Please, follow me, and I will make you a sort of fleecer of men.

And so I go forth to make the earth cold. It is unarguably my moral duty. I am required by conscience to ensure that winters are harsher, longer; that ice caps grow and arable land is consumed by glacial creep. I fight for shorter, cooler summers; I pray the earth to slumber longer during winter's solstice and yet to speed past the summer solstice with nary a heat wave, irrespective of hemispheric balance. I shall work miracles.

I am an equipped warrior: I have my word of truth -- the holy word of inconvenient truth -- infused with the infallible and inerrant words of science's best minds, minds that have gathered in great councils, dividing truth from all that isn't. I have my switch plate of righteousness that runs directly to my solar panels; the holy wind rushes through my windmills, and tongues of fire no longer lick at my carbon-smeared furnace. I wear the helmet of carbon sequestration. My feet are shod with the good news of hybridism.

Permit me, please, to cite only one passage of my new holy canon, prophetic in its precision:

'The harbinger of change shall come as Prius* -- which means before -- drawn from the legal term, nisi prius (unless before):"unless before the day appointed (nisi prius) the judges shall come ... (which they always do) and there try the cause."† The judges indeed are coming.' (AIT 6:6-9)

I walk with the cool, controlled sun in my face, and the carbon-neutral magisterium at my back. I cannot falter, for I have courage. I look with faith to the hills and see from whence my turbine help comes; I walk through the valley of the shadow of heat-death, and I cast the shadow aside.

(Blessed indeed are the carbon-pure in spirit, for they shall see their god shivering on a carbon-neutral street.)

But these streets are paved with green.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

*The Toyota Prius is a popular hybrid car. Owners consider this a carbon offset; though they do this, of course, without ever asking if Toyota uses MORE carbon fuel to manufacture and deliver the car.

†I happened to find this quote at the Free Dictionary after searching for the definition of "prius." I thought the passage perfectly apt for a satirical look at the religious fervor associated with much, if not most, environmental activism.