Spring Break
Clean energy can carry hidden costs
Michelle Anjirbag
Issue date: 11/3/09 Section: Commentary
The U.S. has always been a mecca for religious freedom - the dream for people in oppressed situations around the world - where the streets are paved with gold and no one is persecuted for their beliefs. But history shows us that reality is much to the contrary, and while it is a nice dream, the only people to have truly experienced that religious expression free from judgment were the first Puritans to settle in the Nantucket Sound area.
Where would the Puritans have been without the Wampanoag tribes to welcome them and aid them in the New World? We teach children from preschool about the first Thanksgiving, and how the settlers would not have survived without the aid of the people already living there, known as the People of the First Light.
We tend to brush over, or neglect to mention how much we then took from the People of the First Light and thousands of other tribes as we continued to settle the continent - the farmers seizing land because they had the better weapons, dispersing the smallpox blankets, rounding up tribes in what essentially amounted to concentration camps, forcibly assimilating children - all because the new settlers in their arrogance and sense of entitlement believed that they had the right to take what they wanted after so much had already been taken from them. They passed on that sense of righteous destruction based on perceived differences and a need for resources to their children, and to all of us. In this way, the U.S. has committed genocide it barely takes responsibility for, while criticizing the same behavior in nations around the world and demanding extensive reparations for the people so injured elsewhere. Because the U.S. clearly leads by example, it is deemed acceptable for us to continue to take from these tribes, and destroy the remaining fragments of their culture for profit - as long as we do it in such a fashion that we appear to be working for some greater good.
Cape Wind has proposed an offshore wind farm where 130 turbines, each standing 400 feet tall, would be placed along the horizon in Nantucket Sound, off of Popponesset Beach in Mashpee, Mass. Now, I firmly believe in finding alternative sources of energy so that we can evolve to a more sustainable mode of living, hopefully slowing our habitual murder of the planet, but I question the cost of that belief in this matter. A late-stage move to block the project by the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag people claims that the land and water comprising the Nantucket Sound is eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a "traditional cultural property." The tribes are interested in blocking the Cape Wind project - backed by a group of private investors - because the turbines would block the rising sun, the keystone of their religious practices. They also claim that there is an ancestral burial ground on Horseshoe Shoal where the turbines would be placed. Other objections from activist groups pertain to the danger such turbines would pose to the local ecology. Sen. Edward Kennedy also opposed the project until his death as the "triumph of special interests over state interests."
Where would the Puritans have been without the Wampanoag tribes to welcome them and aid them in the New World? We teach children from preschool about the first Thanksgiving, and how the settlers would not have survived without the aid of the people already living there, known as the People of the First Light.
We tend to brush over, or neglect to mention how much we then took from the People of the First Light and thousands of other tribes as we continued to settle the continent - the farmers seizing land because they had the better weapons, dispersing the smallpox blankets, rounding up tribes in what essentially amounted to concentration camps, forcibly assimilating children - all because the new settlers in their arrogance and sense of entitlement believed that they had the right to take what they wanted after so much had already been taken from them. They passed on that sense of righteous destruction based on perceived differences and a need for resources to their children, and to all of us. In this way, the U.S. has committed genocide it barely takes responsibility for, while criticizing the same behavior in nations around the world and demanding extensive reparations for the people so injured elsewhere. Because the U.S. clearly leads by example, it is deemed acceptable for us to continue to take from these tribes, and destroy the remaining fragments of their culture for profit - as long as we do it in such a fashion that we appear to be working for some greater good.
Cape Wind has proposed an offshore wind farm where 130 turbines, each standing 400 feet tall, would be placed along the horizon in Nantucket Sound, off of Popponesset Beach in Mashpee, Mass. Now, I firmly believe in finding alternative sources of energy so that we can evolve to a more sustainable mode of living, hopefully slowing our habitual murder of the planet, but I question the cost of that belief in this matter. A late-stage move to block the project by the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag people claims that the land and water comprising the Nantucket Sound is eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a "traditional cultural property." The tribes are interested in blocking the Cape Wind project - backed by a group of private investors - because the turbines would block the rising sun, the keystone of their religious practices. They also claim that there is an ancestral burial ground on Horseshoe Shoal where the turbines would be placed. Other objections from activist groups pertain to the danger such turbines would pose to the local ecology. Sen. Edward Kennedy also opposed the project until his death as the "triumph of special interests over state interests."
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Notgodblessamericagoddamnamerica
posted 11/03/09 @ 1:31 PM EST
As oppose to trying to cover up your liberal agenda it may makes more sense to cut straight to the chase and say the United States and capitalism are ideas of the devil. (Continued…)
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