Having grown up just past the dawn of the nuclear age, I remember having silly romantic notions as a child about the scariest thing imaginable:
Fall-out shelters.
A cozy concrete hang-out: just enough room for our family of five – our favorite snacks on hand, me with a stack of comic books, curled up away from nuclear annihilation.
I grew up, but I’ve come to understand that key players we’ve observed making hash of public policy are all about similar fantasies.
There’s Elon Musk. He wants to settle Mars.
His 14 children in tow – by blast-off it might be 114 offspring — he sees himself planting seeds of civilization, a new race of Elon-noids.
Understand, major logistical problems attach to this aside from a 140-million-mile commute.
Fact is, life on Mars would be unbearable unless one likes the panorama of concrete.
Adam Becker’s new book, “More Everything Forever,” mocks tech-bro fantasists like Musk, in particular the ridiculousness of those Mars ambitions.
First, the new Martians would live in cramped quarters underground — no “Jetsons” townhomes, these.
No highways or bike paths, either — just tunnels.
An exceptionally big part of the bargain would be the costs — the food, the water, the everything.
“Even the air Mars residents breathe would cost money,” Becker writes. “Mars would make Antarctica look like Tahiti.”
Enough about that fantasy. Now to discuss life on this planet.
Lawmakers who now seek to do a megalomaniacal president’s budgetary bidding are insulating themselves against the fallout, most ducking direct contact with constituents.
No matter what happens on the outside, this band of cowards — the few, the insulated — will remain bunkered in climate-controlled marble.
Following the Project 2025 playbook — something the Great Liar said he knew nothing about — they are attempting to make our home-sweet-home every bit as inhospitable to Americans of modest means as the red planet is to humanity.
What Republicans want to do with key strands of the social safety net would cast millions into not-survivable straits — an enrollment drop of 10 million off Medicaid, most alarmingly.
Add the Project 2025-devised evisceration of climate policies and the general despoiling of the delicate environment that sustains us.
Until further notice (January 2028) the Environmental Protection Agency has only one interest, and it’s not yours or mine, unless you or I mine, drill or burn fossil fuels for corporate profit.
The new “stewards” of the environment just took carbon dioxide off the list of concerns by the agency.
New policies announced by the administration mean power plants and other polluters need not consider CO2 a concern, that it isn’t a pollutant, that “fossil fuels do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution.”
In whatever way one classifies the pollution in question — harmless gas or planet killer — dozens of toxic elements accompany CO2 into our breathing space package — from ozone to mercury and more.
The New York Times quotes The industry puppet now heading the EPA, Lee Zelden saying his charge is to “drive a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
To that, we who breathe should respond: “Suck on a tailpipe, Sir.”
Is this what America voted for? No. it isn’t. I guarantee that if the slumlord in the White House right now campaigned on those terms in 2020, he wouldn’t reside there today.
What Republicans are seeking to replicate with their oppressive budget designs is actually quite like life on Mars with the Elon-noids, just not with the comfy shelter.
Look at the GOP crew members with their cushy surroundings, servants and pages scurrying to meet their every need.
Food to survive? The Elon-noids on Mars will be able to afford anything at all. So, too, the chosen few whom moneyed interests sent to Washington to do as they say are guaranteed to have all they need. Of course, they believe mothers on food aid can do with less.
Shelter? No problem. As with a Mars trip, where the extraordinary is in order, Republican lawmakers – the few, the insulated – are bunkered in climate-controlled marble. How better not to have to deal with the unmerciful elements of daily life?
Air pollution? That’s not a concern for people with the means to buy the very air they breathe.
So in their congressional cocoons they reside, Capitol tunnels to connect them.
They are frantic not to interact with taxpayers. They can’t defend policies that benefit only those who have every benefit of life on Earth, leaving others to struggle without health care and clean air. You know – the stuff of survival.
Tough nuts. Those who must endure the elements on this planet can fend for themselves. Or they can catch the next space flight.
Long-time newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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