Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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Stop the Overburdening of Mother Earth by PITT DICKEY Time fl ies when you are dead. Let us meditate for a moment on the concept of time. If you had more time, would you want it? What would you do with it? Want to have more time? Experience something unpleasant. Bad things slow time down. Bad news is good in that it extends our sensation of time by slowing it down. A toothache can slow time right down to a full stop. Sitting in the little exam room waiting for the doctor to see you can bring time to about one quarter speed. Listening to the media obsessing about the royal wedding between Kate and Prince William turned time into a soggy ball of infi nity. Time slows down when you are not having fun. Is the wedding of two extremely wealthy people in England going to improve the life of the average American? Oh sure, there will be some pretty groovy wedding trinkets for sale. Souvenir tea cups with the happy couple, tongue depressors with the Queen’s signature, reusable catheters featuring Buckingham Palace all have their place in American culture. But will the wedding bring an end to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? Will it prevent the U.S. from bombing the Syrians into democracy? The amount of media coverage of the Royal wedding is excessive when compared to more important world events such as whether Harrison Barnes was going to play for the Tar Heels next season. The return of Harrison was a truly earth-shaking decision that affects the lives, prosperity and mental health of all North Carolinians except for the small minority of Duke fans who are quietly sobbing and gnashing their teeth in a dumpster on the corner of 9th Street in Durham. Would a euphemism by any other name smell as sweet? I think so. Let us consider some other unpleasant things that will slow time down to let us appear to live longer. Which of these terms sounds better: strip mining, open-pit mining or mountain top removal? Bust your hump and test your geology IQ — which of these is a type of coal — anthracite, bactrian, bituminous or dromedary? West Virginia is enjoying having its mountain tops sawed off for a type of coal mining called surface mining. Big Coal has developed a wonderful term for the junk that lies on top of coal. What a normal person might call trees, plants, hills, fl owers and streams, Big Coal calls “overburden.” WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Overburden is bad. Very bad. Overburden blocks our access to light, lively, clean, sparkling coal. To get to that lovely coal thoughtlessly buried under the overburden, Big Coal has to pay to scrape it away and shove it into valleys. Big Coal is just following the musical advice given by Handel in The Messiah. Removing the overburden by surface mining is doing the Lord’s work in that “every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain.” Dumping the tops of mountains into the valleys below and releasing interesting chemicals into the water table is just what Handel ordered. Anything called overburden sounded really bad to a focus group. Big Coal paid a lot of money to an advertising company to come up with the word “overburden.” Break the term down, “over” paints a mental picture of something that is between you and the good stuff. “Burden” connotes useless junk that needs to be removed. It’s a win-win term for Big Coal. How could anyone be in favor of something called overburden? Through the power of magical thinking, Big Coal has turned trees, fl owers, hills and mountains into overburden. It would be unpatriotic to be in favor of overburden. All right thinking Americans should hate overburden. Trees are an evil Kenyan socialist conspiracy. Big Coal’s concept of removing “overburden” has spread to Republican economic theory. Consider Paul Ryan’s budget proposal to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. Poor, sick or old people are “overburden.” The poor and the elderly are the overburden standing between the rest of us and a Golden Dawn of renewed prosperity. All will be swell if we scrape them off the face of the Earth. Just drop them into some obscure valley where we don’t have to see them, think about them or pay for their healthcare. Next time you see a poor person tell him, “Get out of here, you unpatriotic overburden.” Tell him Congressman Paul Ryan sent you. PITT DICKEY, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? editor@upandcomingweekly.com MAY 4-10, 2011 UCW 9