Wasting Green on Green Jobs Projects in Buffalo
There’s only one thing worse than a miserable human being self-righteously lecturing you about what you should be eating. Namely, it’s a miserable human being who’s funded by the government self-righteously lecturing you about what you should be eating. Unfortunately, the latter’s a reality in Western New York. A recent Buffalo News story detailed a $3.1 million grant for the granola crew to build “hoop houses,” which are structures where people who cried both when Phish broke up and when they reunited can grow “vegetables, flowers and fish.” None of those sound tasty, but everyone’s paying either way.
It’s bad enough being forced to subsidize those who think globally and act locally. But what’s not helping is the particularly inflammatory attitude flashed by L. Nathan Hare, whom the News identifies as executive director of the Community Action Organization of Erie County. For one, he infuriatingly points out that
The stimulus package, which provided billions of dollars to prime the nation’s economic pump, “was like a miracle for us,” Hare said.
At one time not too long ago in American history, getting funding for such hippie nonsense would indeed be a miracle. There’s a reason why private companies won’t pay people to do busy work in the name of profoundly unfeasible green goals: it’s hard to make money performing useless tasks. But the stimulus changed that, as we’re lamentably seeing on local grass plots.
Hare is also keen on watching what we ingest:
The idea is to show communities how to grow their own healthy, safe and affordable food, and teach “what real food is” as opposed to the abundance of fat-, sugar-and preservative-laden items found on store shelves, he said.
A better idea would be to have a government that minded its own damn business and let people eat whatever the hell they want. If poncho-wearers choose to feed their children dirt-caked, pesticide-free roots, it’s up to them. But it’s beyond tiresome that the nanny state is monitoring us by the bite. Such an approach becomes especially infuriating when the message is delivered with snotty arrogance:
Hare has a good-natured message for those who think the federal stimulus program is a waste of taxpayer dollars: “This is your stimulus money in action. I’m doing green initiatives with it, and if you don’t like it you can just stay mad.”
Um, that’s not “good-natured” despite what the sympathetic News reporter claims. But Hare is right about one thing: taxpayers should stay mad. The only ones funding such programs should be rich twits who think lawn-based agriculture will save Mother Earth; the rest of us should be able to opt out.
But we’re stuck with it, just like we’re apparently stuck with Hare crawling in area backyards planting magic beans bought with everyone’s money. Maybe he could take Van Jones’s old job; if nothing else, it would keep him from micromanaging in Buffalo. Plus, Hare could be condescending as he wastes cash on a whole new level.
He can pack up his dirt farm and take it with him. The rest of us will be enjoying our lives, eating 100 percent gloriously unhealthy food at La Nova and Tim Hortons. It’s our way of flipping off a government that should address its own obesity instead of paying private citizens to grow food in stinky little huts.
Tags: Buffalo News, Erie County, funding, green jobs, nanny state, stimulus, taxpayer, Western New York
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Hyperbole!
for decades the government has subsidized the delocalization, and all of a sudden righteous indignation over a small local farming enterprise? really?
Right. This article is all about making fun of hippies. Little else. Oh, well.
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