I’ve missed this fake anti-holiday several times. Let’s go back to 2011 when I marked “Earth” Hour for the third time. I wouldn’t change a thing.
= = = = = START UNCHANGED REPRINT:
Polistra and Happystar continue their annual salute to Earth Hour, this time with a special emphasis on Edison’s light bulb.
You can take our bulbs when you pry them from our hot, bright hands.
Here’s Polistra’s hero FDR on rural electrification:
In those days, there was only one discordant note in that first stay of mine at Warm Springs: When the first of the month bill came in for electric light in my little cottage I found that the charge was eighteen cents a kilowatt hour — about four times as much as I paid in another community, Hyde Park, New York. And that light bill started my long study of proper public utility charges for electric current, started in my mind the whole subject of getting electricity into farm homes throughout the United States.
And so, my friends, it can be said with a good deal of truth that a little cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia, was the birthplace of the Rural Electrification Administration. Six years ago, in 1932, there was much talk about more widespread and cheaper use of electricity, but it is only since March 4, 1933, that your Government has reduced that talk to practical results. Yes, electricity is a modern necessity of life, not a luxury. That necessity ought to be found in every village, in every home and on every farm in every part of the wide United States.
The dedication of this Rural Electrification Administration project in Georgia today is a symbol of the progress we are making — and, my friends, we are not going to stop.
In many countries today democracy is under attack by those who charge that democracy fails to provide its people with the needs of modern civilization. I do not subscribe to that charge. You and I, the people of this State and the people of all the states, believe that democracy today is succeeding but that an absolute necessity for its future success is the fighting spirit of the American people — their insistence that we go forward and not back.
What would FDR think of us now? All that planning, all those dams and power plants and poles and wires built directly by the Feds and indirectly under Federal urging; all those farms and cities where civilized light replaced primitive darkness. All flushed down the lo-flo toilet. And flushed. And flushed. And flushed.
Our “modern” leaders have spent the last 22 years proving those old complainers right: proving that democracy can’t or won’t provide the needs of modern civilization. Some of these “modern” leaders claim to be FDR’s heirs, which makes their intentional sabotage of the light, their intentional return to crude primitivism even more shameful.
= = = = = END UNCHANGED REPRINT.
Polistra's Mill 