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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 4/23/19

Earth Day is 24/7, and Every Hour and Every Minute of Every Day According to Local Activists

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Paul Haeder
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For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

- The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen

Part One - I am scrambling to get this first part of the Earth Day two-part article series up and running while I work hard Friday night to write the second, more sobering part of what Earth Day 2019 is and, unfortunately, what it is not.

I like going local by looking at global issues. I will talk about the reality of recycling products as a big scam. I will write about all this chatter from millionaires like Naomi Klein and now the leadership of the so-called alternative web journalist site, The Intercept. I watched the interview and the live-illustration by Molly Crabtree, "We Can Be Whatever We Have the Courage to See," which, according to Klein's millionaire husband, Avi Lewis, has had 4 million hits already as of April 18, 2019.

Hits on the internet, and this Lewis fellow declares this as a huge win for Mother Earth, for "the movement", and, surely, a grand win for the New Green Deal. This can be so disheartening to hear the idiocy around these moments and digital expressions. Earth systems are in total collapse, and it's more than some Canadian writer's world view or the Holly-wood-ization of the world seen through the looking glass of the two dirtiest countries' liberal spokespeople: Canada and USA.

Daily, it becomes more and more delusional on all aisles of the political manure pile, but also on all fronts of mainstream media and fake alternative media. The Press is out to lunch, man, big time. Having Today's (4/18) Democracy Now:

"We can be whatever we have the courage to see." That's the message of a stunning new video released by The Intercept, Naomi Klein and award-winning artist Molly Crabapple Wednesday that imagines a future shaped by the Green New Deal. It's called "A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez." The film was co-written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, along with Avi Lewis, the co-founder of The Leap. We speak with Avi Lewis and award-winning artist Molly Crabapple about the power of art to create social change.

Crabtree's new thing is as follows:

As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated explainer journalism, collaborating with Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The ACLU and The Equal Justice Initiative to tell stories about America's prison system and history of institutional racism.

"Live-illustrated explainer journalism"! Wow. That's a whole other book to write about, what this all means to humanity's greater and greater loosening of its grip on sanity. In any case, the part two of my Earth Day hit will look at this newfangled mixed-up and same old capitalism-loving soft-shoe bull crap lying about what has to be done to mitigate a world without ice. Because that's the fact, Jack, so bullet trains and cool-ass urban jobs and folks like Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, a Canadian self-proclaimed Jewish couple with Jewish children, well, they are living the good millionaires' liberal lifestyles, and the revolution and the rebellion will not live in the belly of the controlled opposition, which they are very centered inside.

Interesting the power centers in Canada vis-a-vis the family lines of both Klein and Lewis, from Wikipedia, really are at the top of elites. I bring this up to point out that the narrative around climate change and the New Green Deal and poverty and envirogees and starvation and physically harming toxins in this Mad Mad Mad World of Consumerism CANNOT be shunted into elitist and vain-glory liberal and pro-capitalist politics or centers of non-profit gobbledygook:

Avi Lewis is the great grandson of Moshe Losz (Lewis), an outspoken member of the Jewish Bund who left Svislach, Poland (today Belarus), after being interrogated by the Russians and threatened with death or the Gulag for his political activity. He left for Montreal in 1921, with his wife Rose (ne'e Lazarovitch) and three children. Avi Lewis is the grandson of former federal NDP leader David Lewis and the son of former Ontario NDP leader and diplomat Stephen Lewis and journalist Michele Landsberg. Avi Lewis is married to journalist and author Naomi Klein; his sister Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is the executive director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents were self-described "hippies" who moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is director of the British Columbian office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Before World War II, her paternal grandparents were communists, but they began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. In 1942, her grandfather, an animator at Disney, was fired after the 1941 strike, and had to switch to working in a shipyard instead. By 1956 they had abandoned communism. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called red-diaper baby.

Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, was born into a well-connected political and journalistic family; he works as a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. The couple's only child, son Toma, was born on June 13, 2012. (Wikipedia)

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Paul Kirk Haeder has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and (more...)
 
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