It’s one week until mid-term elections and the air is full of the reverberations of crashing narratives.
For our purposes, a narrative is a tale tailored to convey a viewpoint, without regard to accuracy or veracity.
Just today, it was heartening that no less a source than Greenpeace, the organization that would be happiest if the only humans left walking this Earth were these tree-hugging, whale-protecting, climate crazies, threw in the towel on plastic recycling.
The quick synopsis of the Greenpeace news release is that recycling plastic fails because it’s tough to collect the stuff, even tougher to sort, often environmentally harmful to recycle, frequently is contaminated with toxic materials and it’s not economic.
They could have started with the last point, but why spoil their fun?
I got a course in recycling when our tiny borough just gave up on it a few years back. We’d dutifully trekked to the containers every other week, filling the appropriate bins and reaping a slight benefit in terms of paying lower bills for trash pickup.
The borough tried to pass the buck to the residents for canceling the program, saying too many people were not putting materials in proper bins. The real truth is that since so many communities were recycling, the supply of recycled materials was up and the price paid for same was down.
It’s Economics 101. Price usually is hostage to supply and demand.
I suspect that not that many years down the line, hardcore environmentalists will drop their narrative that electric vehicles are environmentally friendly.
That friendliness is only true if you discount the fact they must be recharged – a lot – and the electricity to do so often is fairly environmentally unfriendly in its generation.
Add in the negative impact of mining for metals and various minerals to build the cars, and the recycling nightmare of the battery packs and other aspects of electric vehicles when they no longer are viable, and it’s a loser waiting for the Greenies to ditch the narrative.
Nowhere are narratives more rampant and ridiculous than in politics.
In a week – longer if your state is like Pennsylvania with incompetent election management – we should know the shelf life of many narratives.
They are, in no particular order:
The electorate cares not about inflation, but wants to punish those Jan. 6 protesters.
Or, never mind inflation, what really matters to voters is whether the federal government can ram abortion law down the throats of the nation instead of letting states pass their own legislation.
Sure, recent polls show up to 80 percent of the respondents putting crime at the top of the list regarding problems plaguing the country, but what people really want is for all MAGA types to be imprisoned.
In a similar vein, forget those images of rampant border incursions, or the statistical admission that this is the worst year for such since records began to be kept, what this nation’s voters actually want is more Woke, socialist, left-wing zealots in all phases of government and education.
It’s not that John Fetterman is looking to be short on physical and mental competency to hold a Senate office, it’s that the NBC info babe who opined as much after an interview (and before Fetterman’s zombie-like debate performance) should be fired.
And, last, it’s been posted in The Atlantic, the combination left-wing propaganda rag and trial balloon launch center, that all the over-reaching, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical tin-pot tyrant bureaucrats who made a mess of Coronavirus measures, should not be held accountable for their ridiculously Draconian measures. Forgive and forget, exactly what they were unwilling to do.
Wear a protective hat should you be going out in coming days, lest you be injured when hit on the head by the debris of these crashing narratives.
Sam Ross Jr's site 