Phil's Place: Uncovering The Obvious

Turning Over Rocks

Bird spies a bug

I recently read a 1995 article about how the national media ignored the last 3 years of Martin Luther King, Jr’s life’s accomplishments. His concerns about what was going on in America in 1965-8, were not being addressed in the 1960's, or when the article was written in 1995 any more than the same issues are being addressed or remedied today.

“Anybody home?”

Excerpt from The Dr. Martin Luther King You Don’t See On TV;

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights.

Mount Shasta on Friday

The GOP/ Wall Street/ Corporate/ Military/ right wing extremist agenda is more evident today than ever, as they blatantly vilify the people and organizations who stand up for social justice, equality, public works, and the protection of natural resources.

Flower on Steve’s porch

Yet, there still is hope.

We can reduce our fossil fuel consumption by using solar and wind for most of our energy needs. This would help eliminate the free protection we give to international oil interests who require our excessively large military presence throughout the world.

Less money for wars and armed interventions means more money for our beleaguered infrastructure, public works, arts, libraries, schools, jobs, job training, land and watershed reclamation. Just to name a few things we have been told that we are ‘too poor’ to spend our nations money on.

The baby raven is growing up

Industry is fulling engaged in activities that are accelerating global warming. Rather than curtailing the use of fossil fuels, more and more oil, gas and coal is being dug up, forced out of the earth, and sold on the international market.

This reckless, irresponsible business plan encourages continued burning of fossil fuels, even though that is the cause of our climate disruption, and destruction of the life supporting systems we rely on.

Shasta Bolly, (or bally) in silhouette

We can protect our fresh water from further pollution and waste, by ending the practices of extracting, processing, transporting, and burning ‘natural’ gas, oil, and coal.

Goldfinch

We can double the amount of fresh water available for human consumption by not eating meat at every meal. 70% of America’s fresh water is used for livestock production.

Many forms of transportation are more efficient than gas powered trucks and automobiles, and they cause far less damage to the environment. If we marketed electric cars and trucks as aggressively as oversized, gas guzzling, macho pickups and SUV’s, the industry would become more profitable and assuredly, more sustainable.