Republican Garden Of Eden

The Great Wall of China, May 2005

From reading Republican bloggers and the redundant talking points from their pundits that they blindly parrot, it seems that, if they had their way, the Republican dream for America would be a nation with

• a one-party state
• a media controlled by the ruling party
• morality defined by the ruling party
• an all powerful head of the party who answers to no one
• the ruling party defining the rights of all people
• no constitution and a rubber-stamp judiciary
• no dissent
• an emphasis on militarism and a lust for war
• businesses having greater rights than individuals
• no protection for workers
• no environmental controls, where toxins can be poured in the water and contaminants can be released into the air with reckless abandon

Well, it turns out that the Republican Garden of Eden does exist on earth. It's called China.

I took the photo at the top of this post when I was in China last May. The lack of clarity of the sections of the Great Wall in the background has nothing to do with my camera. Nor is it a marine layer similar to those we get here in Los Angeles (since the Great Wall is inland).

Nope, it is pollution. Pollution allowed by a government that puts business profits and economic growth above individual health; a government that says that, although the skies are shared by everyone, they can serve as the trash receptable of the chosen few; a government that refuses to acknowledge we all drink water from the same sources in order to turn a blind eye to its friends who dump toxins into the rivers.

I often wonder when will enough be enough? When is it okay to have a year that the economy maintains instead of grows? When will it be okay for share price to stay steady? When will it be okay to acknowledge that the air we breathe is an inherently public commodity that cannot be privatized for use as a trash dump? Must we wait until the part of the Great Wall that is clear in the foreground of the photo is equally obscured by pollution?

China is the future of America, literally and figuratively. We are looking at a crystal ball, but the pollution clouds the image.