Going Green

(Or my preachy Hallmarky-card
contribution
for this year's Blog Action Day
for the Environment,
October 15--it's still 11:26 p.m.,
so I still beat the deadline! hah!)


Last year (or was it two years ago?),
green was the new pink in fashion.

now there's
something green
for everything that isn't:

black is the new green
for web surfers,
smokers can rejoice
with organic cigarettes.
male voyeurs even have
an environmentally-friendly FHM issue.

wanton consumers tote
eco-friendly shopping bags,
mining companies
have green technologies
to bore into mountains,
war economies
have environmentally-friendly bombs,
fuel-guzzling Western luxury cars
can bathe in bio-diesel
squeezed from the guts
of Third World toddlers
howling in haciendas.

so many things green
for realities that are not.

sometimes
we forget
that green
is not about
dollars
but really about
land to till
water for all
air and freedom
flames burning
for justice.

Green is
not about "changing the world"
in little ways
for big people.

Green is
changing the world
in big ways

for little people.

Sometimes,
Going green means seeing red.

The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam and other random news

Am sharing some amusing news bits I stumbled upon in the course of surfing for mining-related articles. Enjoy!

• Wikipedia's one of the best things about the web. I heart Wikipedia! But so did six employees from Japan's Department of Agriculture, who apparently hearted it so much that they spent more office hours on Wiki entries on billboard typos, movies, and Gundam than on administrative concerns. See this: Japan bureaucrats chided for shirking work, editing Wikipedia

• Russia tests the 'dad of all bombs'. The thermobaric device tested by Russian military is said to be 'non-nuclear' and therefore 'environmentally-friendly'. So politically chic at a time when the "in" thing is to proclaim that one will be "going green" to save the earth. The catch: It's still a bomb--a weapon of mass destruction that can be used indiscriminately in wars of aggression by countries such as the United States in Afghanistan.
  

• Prince Harry killed in Iraq. Or at least, that was what a sculptural piece by Daniel Edwards portrays. At first I thought this was novel. Then I realized that the artist was the same guy who did the Paris Hilton Autopsy and the "Suri Cruise poop" sculpture. Then things began to get a wee bit predictable.

• In its blatantly misogynist query of whether the US is ready for a woman president, American political satire series 'The Daily Show' casts former Philippine President Corazon Aquino as a slut. That was done in rather poor taste. It is true that land-owning elites under the Aquino administration used her agrarian "reform" law to consolidate their dominance over large tracts of land (as the bloodshed in Aquino's very own Hacienda Luisita poignantly demonstrated). It is true that the "peace process" of the post-dictatorship regime was used by the status quo as a veneer for more political persecution and human rights violations. But 'slut' is such an infantile expletive, one that fails to articulate the atrociousness of Aquino's record of political compensation.
  

Free Burma Day