The Poetry Contest
by Eric Blair (3/2/98)

One of America’s poet laureates of recent years, a California educator who is such an idiot that I won’t even mention his name, noticed that groups of children to which he talked seemed universally convinced that we had ruined the world already.
     His response was to instigate a national poetry contest for them, and to help them become natural "mentors" who go out to the rivers to save them, and return with a river of words about them.
    Let’s get this straight.
    This idiot is right in the first instance.  Today’s American youth do believe the world is done for.
    The reason they do has to do with our idiot poet laureate and his many, many, many colleagues in the environmental culture.  More importantly, it has to do with the propaganda these groups have promulgated via the environmentalist wacko, fellow travelling liberals in our schools.
    Children are not taught how to think these days.  They are taught what to think.
    When I received word from my sister that my grand-nephews had come home from school to explain that Christopher Columbus was a bad white man who had cheated the noble natives of America, and given them diseases, I knew that it was all but over.  When a teenaged girl chastised me for smoking a cigar because her school had taught her that it was bad to smoke, I knew the day was coming when the smoke detectors in my home would be devices owned by the FBI.  And now, because of these poetical and educational idiots, ten year old children are experts on the subject of the non-existent global warming problem!
    Al Gore and his friends (Ralph Nader for one)  have all but won the day.
    Are there environmental problems?  Of course.  Have we recognized this fact as a society?  Certainly.  Is there more to do?  Damn right!  Does the socialist system these idiots treasure at heart represent a better way to do the job?  Take a good look at environmental conditions in the former Soviet Union.
    Do the kids know that the American economic system has responded more quickly to these problems than the noble American native culture ever did?  Not a chance.  Have these kids been taught that the wooly mammoth was almost certainly hunted into extinction by the ancestors of the current noble native Americans?  I doubt it.  Have they been told that after the Spanish reintroduced horses to North America (the horse originated here), it was just the technology the heretofore on foot noble native Americans had been looking for so they could increase their harvest of buffalo?  Probably not.
    Have they been told that tobacco was first cultivated by the noble American native, who introduced it into our culture?  If they have, then the class probably taught them that when the white Europeans got hold of it, they turned it into a business, which is evil, and tried to kill us all with it.
    God, but I despise most American poet laureates!
    The noble American natives, in my opinion, are great.  I admire anybody who can feed himself.  But, but these latter-day environmentalist saints whether poet, teacher or vice-president, shouldn’t be allowed with a half a mile of our children.

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