Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Paul Cummins
Mirror contributing writer

   It is virtually a truism that yesterday’s stupidities and missed opportunities result in today’s crises and calamities. And, of course, the corollary is that today’s stupidities and missed opportunities are the crises and calamities that we impose on tomorrow’s generations. The lack of air quality standards yesterday led us to today’s air pollution. The wasteful uses of soil yesterday have resulted in a terrible national loss of arable land today. The ignorance of dumping waste in streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans yesterday has resulted in the depressing depletion of clean and clear water today.
   Because we all want to be good parents and good providers for our children and for future generations, we save, that is, we conserve our money; we try to place our children in good schools; we seek good medical testing and diagnostic procedures to guarantee their health. We want to act today in a responsible manner to ensure a beneficial tomorrow.
   Then, why do we tolerate the blatant anti-conservation, anti-environmental protection policies of the current administration? The Bush Administration has made it clear that it disregards the truisms expressed above. It places short-term profits for the few over long-term posterity for the many. Short-term profits are valued above the preservation of the earth’s limited, finite, and rapidly diminishing resources.
   In his short one-and-a-half-year term, the current President-select has presided over a shocking series of environmental de-regulation actions: Consider just a few (see Sierra Magazine, September/ October 2002, pp 36-47):
   Regulations minimizing raw sewage discharges.
A rule prohibiting the Federal Government from awarding contracts to companies that violate federal laws, including environmental regulations.
   • Forest Service regulations giving watershed health, wildlife, and recreation higher priority than timber sales.
   • Requirements that mining companies protect waterways, and clean up mine – related pollution.
   • Army Corp regulations stating that rivers and streams may not be used for dumping industrial waste.
   And, the list goes on, and on. Now, why on earth would anyone want to allow raw sewage discharges, to ignore watershed health, to ignore cleaning up pollution, to dump industrial waste in rivers, and streams? Why?
   The answer is clear, and it is simple answer. Profits. Profits for the few at the expense of all of our tomorrows. The same mind set that permitted corporations to create phony bookkeeping, to pay CEOs outrageous salaries while setting up their companies – and its loyal workers – for a fall, while CEOs could draw out huge profits sticking their employees with the losses; it is this same mind-set that is allowing that same corporate sector to profit at the expense, the heritage of all others. The current corporate scandals have finally penetrated the national consciousness. Unfortunately, the scandalous deregulation behavior of the Administration itself – on behalf of corporate rapacity — has not yet penetrated our consciousness. Back in the 1950s, Marya Mannes asked a profound question; it haunted me then, and should haunt all of us now and prompt us to action:
   “Who is so rich that he can squander forever the wealth of earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed; or so prosperous in land that he can sacrifice nature for un-natural desires? The earth we abuse, and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.”