It’s been obvious now for a number of years that the right wing dominated Republican Party exists through maintenance of a class system. Only by pushing policies that keep the rich rich and the poor poor can they succeed. This is bad. This is very bad. But even worse is the simple fact they have crossed a line and now become willful and unrepentant imbeciles. The result is going to be destruction of the planet. Think I’m overreacting? Read on. Oh, I know this seems extreme, but bear with me for a moment and you may come, if reluctantly, to agree with me.

• Opposition to nearly all environment legislation: Newest on the Republican hit list is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed setting of new limits on mercury and arsenic contamination by big industry (which also opposes new regulations). Mercury is a known neurotoxin that can delay or damage children’s neurological development and result in disabilities including blindness. It’s not good for adults, either. Both substances are emitted by coal-fired plants, and Republicans, in particular, don’t give a shit that we’re poisoning ourselves with the stuff.
• Opposition to regulation of other air pollutants: As we all know, Republicans are constitutionally incapable of supporting substantial expenditures for alternative sources of energy. Thus, in addition to what is pouring out of coal-fired plants, we’re also spewing pollutants from our cars’ and trucks’ tailpipes. In the March 26, 2015 issue of the L.A. Times, reporter Geoffrey Moran cites a study in the recent issue of the Journal of the American Association Psychiatry that supports this pollution as a cause of lower cognitive processing and ADHD in children.
• Opposition to vaccination: The imbecility of this is almost beyond belief. As idiots like Rand Paul say that the choice of vaccination should be left to individuals (and damn the risk to the general public), we now see rising incidences of measles and whooping cough, diseases that can maim or be lethal and that were nearly absent until scientific ignoramuses like Jennie McCarthy came on the scene and Republican politicians decided to take us headlong into the good ol’ days of disability and death.
• Refusal to believe in the human contribution to climate change: If not the above, then this is what’s going to kill us all. 2014 was the warmest year on record for our planet. The fact that morons like James Inhofe can stand in front of Congress with a snowball and deny climate change is proof that Republicans are going to kill us all. The oceans are rising as polar ice melts. Severe storms are becoming more common and destructive. Whole islands and parts of the U.S. coast are going to be flooded into non-existence. The Western U.S. is struggling with record drought. Climate change is going to lead to mass migrations, and these will lead to conflict and killing.

And why do Republicans behave the way they do? Here are two observations I’ve made:

• The U.S. has become a corporatized nation. We’re no longer a representative democracy. Corporations own our politicians, and corporations only feel accountable to their shareholders, not to the public – or the world – at large. Big oil rules, and plans to do so until we all die of suffocation. After all, it’s short term gain that interests them. Not the future for the executives’ descendants.
• The Republican right’s drift into more and more literal, fundamentalist religion with a belief in the “Rapture” means that they can do anything to the planet now because it won’t matter then the Rapture lifts them up to that great paradise in the sky. Yes, these superstitious yahoos actually don’t care about the planet because, to many of them, it’s irrelevant. God will save the deserving while the rest of us go to hell.

C’mon folks. This is 2015. We should have long grown out of primitive superstition. God doesn’t save children from burning buildings. Firemen do. God doesn’t save people with busted guts from dying. Surgeons do. And God isn’t going to save us from the havoc being wrought on the planet through our own environmental disrespect. Only we can do that, and if we don’t wake up and take action, it will soon be too late. Uncontrolled pollution, uncontrolled population growth, lack of potable water, severe weather…Republicans and Democrats, but mostly Republicans (including those dolts on the Supreme Court), better get with it soon, or there’ll be hell to pay for all of us, and not just us infidels.