One/Introduction (Continued)

And we wonder why our kids can’t get fired up enough to vote. In fact, we attack and mock “today’s youth,” each election year, for their apathy and laziness. If only they could vote by texting on their damned cell phones, ha ha. If only they weren’t so busy posting misspelled and ungrammatical comments on YouTube and MySpace, hee hee. If only they weren’t filled with such utter despair by the parade of morally bankrupt weasels that march and preen in front of them in two, four, or six year cycles… oh, wait, that one’s not a joke.

But while there’s nothing to admire at the top levels of government where we’re being murdered, there is a lot going on at the very bottom, where city mayors—not just billionaires like New York’s Michael Bloomberg, but people like Wallace P. Nutting of Biddeford, Maine, and Joanne Atlas of Ringwood, New Jersey4—have taken the lead from Seattle’s Mayor, Greg Nickles, who in the winter of 2005 came to a “staggering” conclusion: (a) his city depended on rain and melted snow for its water supply; but (b) there had been virtually no snowfall all winter.5 From this compact fluorescent energy-saving lightbulb going off came the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, formed as a defiant middle finger aimed directly at the Bush II administration’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol for greenhouse emissions reduction. In fact, the USMCP was formed on the exact day that 141 other nations kicked the Kyoto agreement into action6—with Uncle Sam and his flowing white beard nowhere to be seen.

Why would the mayor of a major US city like Seattle, along with 400 of his colleagues in other cities around the nation, want to challenge George “The Decider” Bush Junior at a time when they all knew that the hyenas at Fox News could tear them apart at any moment for being unpatriotic extremists? “We as mayors have the opportunity to push the envelope and get people thinking, even when it is not politically popular,” Nickles said. “Cities hold the key.”7 But another group of troublemakers at the lower levels of leadership might disagree with that. Begun in 2003 at the instigation of New York Governer George Pataki, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative had nine states8 as full members by 2007 after their governors saw that the Bush/Cheney machine was only interested in the state of the oil industry and the state of the coal industry. It should be no surprise that eight of those states are along the eastern seaboard. Just recite the litany: higher temperatures, increasing storms and fires, rising sea levels…. If Rush Limbaugh bellows in the forest, but the forest is underwater, does he make a sound?

Right view, right intentions, right speech, right actions. Radicals seeking independence from an inattentive and unconcerned government, round two.

Mayors. Governors. What next—citizens?

Well, yes. We can all join these “little leaders” at the city and state levels of government in putting an end to the slow but steady slaughter of six billion human beings. We can prevent our own murders through only two steps of the Eightfold Path: right view and right speech. If we want to live, then there’s the basic foundation for a right view already. That leaves only one step. Note the word that Mayor Nickles chose: he said opportunity, not obligation, and not responsibility. The latter two are dark, heavy words, onerous and odious, but opportunity is a big fluffy ball of bright yellow sunshine. And what is the United States, if not the land of opportunity itself! The perfect place for a perfect word to become transformed from abstraction to realization through a shift in ideology, and through a reinvigoration of the right brain as the command center for finding the right intentions and achieving the right actions.

It starts by asking a simple question.

====SOURCES====

4 www.coolmayors.com/common/directory

5 www.coolmayors.com/common/news/reports

6 www.coolmayors.com/common/about

7 www.coolmayors.com/common/news/reports

8 www.rggi.org/about; Natural Resources Defense Council, “Press Release: Multi-State Compact to Fight Global Warming Expands Once Again.” Apr. 20, 2007.

9 Natural Resources Defense Council, “Press Release: US Not Prepared for Peril from Global Warming.” Apr. 19, 2007.