Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation (14 page)

Folks, this is scary. A major newspaper in Britain, the birthplace of the Magna Carta--the father to our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution--is promoting the idea of the federal government devising how much energy you're allowed to use in your daily lives. For that is what a carbon footprint is: energy usage.

Young fools like Jessy Tolkan of the Energy Action Coalition can mindlessly testify before Congress and demand that the nation's carbon dioxide emissions be cut by 20 percent by 2015 and by 80 percent by 2050.
¹⁶
But when Tolkan flew in six thousand "experts" from around the country to lobby Congress, she unin
tentionally demonstrated how much Americans rely on CO
2
in our daily lives. When asked if such large-scale mobilization was worth it, considering the carbon footprint the people were leaving, she had a confession to make: "This is an issue we struggled with. Does it make sense to encourage travel from all across the country? In the end we feel that what is going to happen over the next four days was worth it."

And there you have liberal sanctimony at work. It's okay for them to fly around the country to engage in activities that
they
believe in, but they are the first to condemn
your
own buying choices and lifestyle habits. Now, there's an "inconvenient truth."

But who can blame them? They are merely following in the carbon footprints of their leader. On Earth Day, President Obama burned through 9,100 gallons of fuel when he parachuted into Iowa to give a speech on energy conservation.

SO HOW, THEN
, has the left pulled this off? How have they managed to pull the organically grown wool over the eyes of the youth vote? The first primary tactic involves the left's total domination of American college campuses.

Meet Claire Roby, a college student in 2007. Claire wanted to make a statement with her Christmas gifts. So on Christmas morning, Claire gave "handmade clocks made from discarded CDs and scavenged electronic components," all of which were wrapped in newspaper. Why? She got dropped as a kid? No. According to a
New York Times
profile, Ms. Roby gave the gift of garbage to do her part to save the planet.
¹⁷
To her, Christmas was no longer the venue to give sacrificially of yourself, finding out what those closest to you actually want for the blessed occasion. No, instead it's an opportunity for po
litical grandstanding. Christmas cards, you see, are evil because they waste paper. Christmas lights? Evil. They waste electricity. And as for those capitalist creations called presents? Well, what's the point of giving someone a gift they actually want when you can instead give the gift of propaganda?

"We'll see how much we can avoid a dinner table argument this year," Roby told the
Times
. Roby, eco-warrior princess, is not alone. At the time the article was written, Roby was an environmental studies major at American University. Bingo.

Unsuspecting students enter college expecting to be intellectually challenged. Instead, professors and administrators subject students to a blizzard of liberal global-warming talking points. What most students are never told, of course, is that the idea that man is warming the planet is relatively new. In the 1970s, the eco-drones were telling us that man was
cooling
the planet. In fact, the concern then was that the world might soon be imperiled by--are you ready for this?--an Ice Age!
Time
's 1974 cover story "Another Ice Age?" and
Newsweek
's 1975 story "The Cooling World" are now cult classics. But in a fashion similar to today's hysteria, these news outlets had falsely deduced that man's actions had triggered worldwide cooling patterns.

Time
and
Newsweek
were not alone. Popular books in the '70s included
The Cooling
and
The Weather Conspiracy--The Coming of the New Ice Age
. What a difference a few decades make.

Obama Zombies now consider global warming all the rage. Their position, and the position of B.H.O., is that man's industrialization, fueled by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, will result in a polar meltdown if action is not taken immediately.

But many of those who study atmospheric conditions believe the exact opposite: that the mild, barely noticeable warming the tempera
ture has seen over the last hundred years is the result of normal planetary motions and natural climate changes. They understand that warming and cooling are largely a function of--drum roll, please--the sun!
¹⁸
Yes, the sun, that massive fiery ball in the sky that enables life on our planet. A bombshell, I know. But if you're losing sleep over such mild warming in the last century, don't. We've now entered a cooling period, one that has brought temperatures down to where they were in 1930.
¹⁹

But rather than present students with both sides of the argument, our "academic" institutions have instead pursued the path of liberal propaganda. In an effort to gobble up as many federal research dollars as possible, once-freethinking and intellectually independent science departments have instead towed the Obama Zombie line while lining up at the federal trough to receive Al Gore-sized portions of taxpayer largesse. The goal: use academicians as megaphones to blast the liberal message far and wide with the hope that graduates will soon constitute a green voting bloc that will forever change the electoral map. Hence the brainwashed likes of a Claire Roby. Poor woman . . . by the time she graduated, her mind was so scrambled she was giving garbage to loved ones for Christmas.

Think I'm overstating academia's role? This headline from the
Chronicle of Higher Education
says it all. "Saving the Planet, by Degrees."
²⁰
The reporter, Piper Fogg, detailed how courses premised on environmentalism have been injected into curricula. So what are students learning in these "saving the planet" courses? If the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is any indicator, nothing useful. Students there maintain a "trash journal" to catalog "every scrap of paper used or banana peel chucked." One wonders how much carbon they emit punching their sinful deeds into a computer that emits carbon.
Let's pray that professors don't actually make these students print out their work on--gasp!--
paper
when submitting class essays!

The indoctrination runs so deep that, in a moment of candor, the
Boston Globe
led off a story this way: "When historians look back on this decade and at what had college campuses most fired up, it won't be the war, or the economy, Obama-mania, or even Britney's babies. It will be a color."
²¹
As the
Globe
noted, there "is no Green Book of eco-friendly schools, but sustainability is already a campus buzzword." Ah yes,
sustainability.
That's the word academics use to push their green agenda these days. The
Globe
defines
sustainability
as "leav[ing] enough resources so our children can live as well as we do now."

The
Chronicle of Higher Education
defines a "sustainable university" as one "that promotes the concept of meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Getting past the academic gobbledygook, college administrators are using the buzzword
sustainability
to promote the left's environmentalism. Specifically, explained the
Chronicle
, they're vowing to "curb carbon emissions," "buy green energy," "reduce waste," "serve organic food," "purchase hybrid cars," "appoint sustainability directors," "build green dormitories," and "plant native shrubbery."
²²

Other schools, including Skidmore College in upstate New York, are "fighting" global warming by imploring students to "Do It in the Dark."
²³
How romantic. Nothing like saving the planet, one sex act at a time. Classy.

"Trayless Tuesdays" are another Obama Zombie favorite. Many institutions, including Cornell University, Skidmore, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, have banished or limited the use of trays in dining halls, all under the banner of "sustainability." The fewer trays, the less water used to wash the trays. The less water
used, the less energy consumption. However, "trayless Tuesdays" have unintended consequences, as the
New York Times
points out: they clog up cafeteria lines and elongate dining hours, since students need to keep leaving their table to get more food than their two hands can carry without a tray.
²⁴
And let's pray that all that walking back and forth doesn't make them increase their breathing, because then they might emit more carbon dioxide into the air.

But again, logic isn't the realm of the Obama Zombie. No,
emotions
and
feeling good
are all that matters.

Undoubtedly, liberal politicians like Obama have colleges to thank for young people's overwhelming support of climate change measures. Academia is whipping out an army of Captain Planets and Eco-Princesses who will stay beholden to liberal candidates if the brainwashing is not undone. It is a tall task. Many professors and administrators see it as their professional duty to preach Gore-based hysteria. For instance, Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, has pledged to make his campus "climate neutral" and believes that his campus needs "to speak with a unified voice and to speak with action" on global warming.
²⁵

At Carnegie Mellon University, administrators openly admitted that the goal behind the construction of the "New House" dorm was to teach students about climate change. How? By being notified when their classmates drop a deuce.

To "pique students' interest in the environment," campus kiosks were outfitted with monitors that register every flick of a light switch or flush of a toilet.
²⁶
That way you can chastise your fellow classmates for going to the dumper and crapping all over the environment.

These "sustainability measures" would be harmless if they weren't so financially costly. Indeed, the only thing that stinks worse than waterless toilets is the cost to install them--costs
that further drive up the already astronomical price of higher education.

Leith Sharp, director in 2007 of Harvard University's Green Campus Initiative, noted that Harvard employs twenty full-time staffers and forty part-time students to sustain its "sustainability" programs, and that's still not enough, according to her. "It's unbelievable how much work [sustainability] is going to be, and people are utterly blind to that fact."
²⁷

Get that? Harvard employs sixty people to combat global warming on campus, and it's still not enough. Cash-flushed Harvard may have that kind of dough to squander, but other schools who sign onto buying green energy and offsetting carbon don't enjoy fat-cat endowments.

In 2008, Middlebury College opened an $11 million biomass plant that burned wood chips "to help heat and cool campus buildings and produce electricity."
²⁸
The high-priced plant was claimed to "reduce the college's consumption of fuel oil by 50 percent" and to "cut the college's greenhouse gas emissions." Tucked away in the eco-warriors' notepad is this bit of fine print: Middlebury needs "20,000 tons of wood chips to replace one million gallons of fuel oil each year."
²⁹
The creation of twenty thousand tons of wood leaves one humongous carbon footprint. Extra trees need to be chopped down, reducing the plant life, which consumes carbon from the atmosphere, and the logging itself may raise greenhouse gases.
³⁰

Emory University in Georgia has a whole different approach: it sends an energy bill to each individual school. According to Ciannat M. Howett, Emory's director of sustainability initiatives, different departments "have a huge incentive to get everyone in the school to reduce usage because then those dollars can go to their core mission,
rather than energy."
³¹
That's it: sacrifice the "core mission" of education on the altar of sustainability.

At the University of Florida, academic departments were charged three thousand dollars per parking pass in an effort to minimize car emissions on campus. Alan T. Dorsey, the chair of the physics department, attacked the policy because he had to dip into research funds in order to cover the new fees. "This cost comes at a bad time," he said.
³²
Ed Poppel was one of the administrators responsible for the parking rate increase, "to get people out of their cars and onto bikes or two legs." Yet he was still driving to work. "I give myself the excuse that in my position I have to be very flexible. It's difficult to tell people to change behaviors if I'm unwilling to change mine."
³³

Can you say "eco-hypocrite"?

When you don't have the money for waterless toilets, sport a cactus. Pitzer College in Southern California doesn't have the money to provide organic food or construct fancy green buildings. Instead, they decided to replace their lawn with cacti. Large chunks of Pitzer's campus lawn were ripped up and replaced with prickly desert plants.
³⁴
Sorry, Obama Zombies, there will be no more studying on the lawn. And if you do decide to study on the lawn, you dare not bring your iPod!