I had occasion to be down in the management of my apartment building today and while chit-chatting with one of the staff the subject of exercise came up. It was then that I remembered something that I had meant to mention to the building management a few times last fall but never did. There were times when the gym had been baking hot. This is because in October and November the late afternoon sun shines directly into the floor-to-ceiling windows of the gym and makes a little solar oven out of the place if there is no air conditioning. Each time it happened I doggedly pushed through my workout anyway, but I would be drenched in sweat halfway into my workout and sometimes felt a bit ill from the heat. It was really hot on those evenings. Each time it would happen I would say to myself that I’d call the office the next day, but that I would forget. Days would go by before it happened again, and each time I got too busy at work to follow through and then forget once more.
Since I was standing there this afternoon I went ahead and mentioned it even though it hasn’t happened in many weeks. My previously cheerful apartment manager instantly bristled with indignation as she related what the cause had been.
I’ll tell you what the problem was. We had a green nazi running around the building. She would pry open the thermostats and turn them way up, turn off all the computers in the business center, unplug all the televisions at the elevators, you name it. She would leave little notes behind too.
I suppose they deduced that it was a woman doing it based on the style of the handwriting, because they did not catch her. (Isn’t it funny how you can just about be dead certain of the gender of a person only by a sample of their handwriting? I’d love to see that explained.) Apparently the Green Gestapo Gal was pretty clever, being capable of avoiding surveillance and somehow escaping the attention of the staff and residents.
I commiserated with my friendly apartment manager. I was just as irritated to learn the cause of my extreme discomfort some weeks back. It ticks me off that somebody would feel so smug about their viewpoint being right that they would choose to inflict it on everyone else without our consent or even our involvement. That “greeny knows best” attitude is enough to infuriate me every single time. I heard a funny critique of high-minded greens by a self professed environmentalist and conservationist on the radio recently. He referred to people with coercive green attitudes as those who were “greener than thou.” I loved that. Perfect.
Owing to how political alignments typically work, what do you bet that the Green Shadow here in my apartment building has a negative attitude toward people who want to restrict access to abortions? How do you think she would respond to an anti-abortion activist padlocking the doors to clinics each night when no one was looking? I’ll bet there’s just about a 100% chance that she would consider that act wrong – even criminal. And yet the hypocrite is so sure that her viewpoint on matters related to energy consumption is not only right, but that she is doing the right thing by forcing her views on others. As far as I’m concerned she’s no different at all in point of principle from the abortion clinic vigilante, and if they catch her I hope that they can press charges for something.
I absolutely HATE when people come off as being somehow morally superior to others because of views that they hold. This is despite the fact that I do firmly believe that certain things are right and wrong. Even so, I have a sense of humility about my beliefs and would not be so presumptive as to force them on others.
At a place where I happen to spend a lot of time recently there was a “Green Committee” that got established to try to find ways to reduce water, power, paper and other resource consumption. Fine so far. Then they started posting snarky little signs all over the place which bluntly tried to guilt trip everyone into various “green” behaviors. “Printing that Document Kills a Tree” and other such crap. As you might guess, that really pulled my pin.
When I saw the signs I sent out an email to some of my friends explaining that if anything like that ever happened in my office I would, out of spite, do the following:
- Drag the sap soaked body of a dead tree down the full length of the building for all to see
- Buy a Hummer that runs on coal and leave it idling all day while I worked
- Bathe each morning in bottled water flown in from Japan by fighter jet
Honestly, I would want to.
If you believe in a cause, great. If you want to struggle to make it successful, wonderful. If you want to sacrifice to see it through, I commend you. If, on the other hand, you want to constrain the liberties of others without their involvement, force them to sacrifice against their will for your goals, make them struggle to suit your ends, then I deplore you. You differ from Stalin and Mao and Franco only by degree and you deserve only scorn.
Take a resusable hemp grocery sack and bag your self righteousness greenies. It’s not even the tiniest bit less offensive than any other form of self righteousness.
