Recently as I’ve walked past Citi Bike racks I’ve noticed a number of them are festooned with big yellow stickers:
Looking closer, I learned that Citibank was “torching the planet:”
That didn’t sound very good, so I visited the URL, and fortunately whoever’s behind the stickers is going to stop the planet-torching, which certainly came as a big relief to me:
They’re also going to “hold the financial sector accountable for its role in fueling climate chaos and environmental racism”–at least as long as the money pipeline from their parents keeps flowing, that is:
If you’re unfamiliar with modern climate science, “climate chaos” refers to the fact that on any given day it can be hot, or cold, or snowy, or rainy, or windy–something our primitive ancestors once called “weather.” This invariably leads to chaos, as anybody who’s ever lost an umbrella knows all too well. As for “environmental racism,” as anyone who’s watched TV knows, all white people are rich and live in big comfortable houses with plenty of spare umbrellas, plus they have attached garages so they can walk straight to their cars without even getting wet, and so the effects of climate chaos on them are minimal:
Meanwhile, everyone else lives in a junkyard and feels climate chaos much more acutely due to roof leaks and the fact that they have to go outside in order to get to their old trucks:
Granted, there are certain exceptions to this (the Jeffersons were rich, the Dukes of Hazzard were poor) but by and large it’s safe to assume everyone in America fits neatly into one category or the other.
Clearly, in order to create a world in which temperature and precipitation never fluctuate, natural disasters never happen, and everyone lives in comfortable mid-century modern domiciles, we need to stop energy, banks, and the movement of money. So how do we do this? Well, by putting stickers on Citibikes, of course, plus leaving plenty of Instragram comments:
See, projects involving natural gas are environmentally racist, which is why leaders like Jesse Jackson are agai–oh, wait:
So you’ve got one group of activists saying pipelines and cheap energy are racist, and you’ve got another group of activists saying exactly the opposite:
This is a lot more complicated than I thought.
Fortunately, the people responsible for the stickers don’t deal in complications, and instead plan to cripple the financial sector by blocking access to office buildings in an age when white collar workers can do everything they need to do at home from their phones while sitting on the toilet:
I had just assumed the Stop The Money Pipeline people were underwritten by their parents, but it turns out these are the parents:
Firstly, Susan Flashman is an absolutely FANTASTIC name for an electrician. Secondly, I do think it’s worth noting that even if they don’t have a great name, any retired electrician owes 60% of their livelihood to all those fossil fuels we’re now supposed to keep in the ground:
Until not too long ago, young people used to protest and take stuff for granted, while the old people yelled at them to stop wasting time and remember on which side their bread was buttered. This is caricatured quite entertainingly in the movie “Down And Out In Beverly Hills,” in which Richard Dreyfuss owns a clothes hanger business. His son tells him that he doesn’t like hangers and has no interest in working with them, and a disgusted Dreyfuss screams at him: “IT’S HANGERS THAT CLOTHE YOU! IT’S HANGERS THAT FEED YOU!…”
Now here we are with a whole crop of retirees who are actively protesting the very things that allowed them to retire–the banks that gave them their mortgages, the industries that paid their salaries–all in the name of somehow making life better for their grandchildren.
Of course, as I say, all of this is complicated. Young people don’t live in the same world their grandparents did, and what’s wrong with wanting a better world for your children? And certainly the banks, the energy companies, and all the rest of them are every bit as rapacious as they are indispensable, and deserve every bit of scrutiny and criticism they receive and more. But our feelings towards these giant companies and industries at any given time often seem dictated more by fashion than by logic. Big Pharma was also evil until 2020, after which questioning their motives in any way made you a villain to precisely the sorts of people who want to “stop the money pipeline.” Natural gas pipelines must be stopped in order to end environmental racism–or we need more pipelines and the companies building them need to hire more people of color, depending on who you ask. We all want to right the ship, but when it really starts listing we tend to heedlessly over to the other side.
Citibank putting its logo on ballfield or a bike share system is just advertising–or, if you’re cynical, a way to shortcut your thinking and buy your approbation, if not your business. Their products can also set you up for life (a mortgage on a home) or trap you in an endless cycle of debt (a high-interest credit card). But a sticker on a bike share system that does nothing but direct you to a site designed to make you fearful and resentful is no better, and in a way is arguably worse, because you’re only useful to the people who put that sticker on there if you’re angry. They don’t care if you prosper, they just want you to be pissed off. A movement that taught people how to understand and benefit from the financial system instead of whipping them up with a bunch of vague rhetoric about “stopping it?” Now that would be something.
