Terminator 7: Revenge of the Government
Steve Campbell | May 06, 2015 | Comments 1
COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU! Really near you.
(Cue music) The Year is 2016. Using outdated and virtually-obsolete Korean wind turbine technology, the Alliance has propelled itself into the future to try once again to destroy the Earth.
In Terminator 6, we convinced them that killing wildlife, birds, bats, mammals and turtles – bulldozing down trees and paving the ground with concrete – was not the best way to Save Our Planet.
But at the end of the movie, the Alliance juggernaut turned, flashed an evil smile, and said, “I’ll be back!”
And back they are, in this exciting new episode in the Terminator ‘God, does it never end’ story.
“Yes,” the Evil Destroyer says. “You may have common sense, logic, reason engineering studies, health concerns, cautions from the Ontario Power Workers, lots of heart and caring and a keen sense of the value of animals, plants and the earth that serves you … but we have billions of dollars of yours that we will use to crush you!”
“You County fools actually believe the MOE cares about the Environment! But we’re all about Big Money corporate deals, and we’ll kill any living creature that gets in our way.”
Yes, they’re back … and this time they have a plan! Turtlegates! Yes, that’s right, a lame excuse for a solution, so they can carry on with their extermination. Apparently, the Alliance does not know that the danger to Blanding’s Turtle is from the treads of bulldozers, cranes and concrete trucks – not from the idle vehicular meanderings of the occasional passerby.
I’m dying to find out how they intend to make turtles move through a gate. Perhaps with signs that say “Turtle Squash Zone Here and Here and Here” and “Turtle Safety Zone Here”. This is the perfect way to make a turtle look both ways before crossing the path of a bulldozer. And, since turtles turn their heads very slowly, they will need to recheck the other way again. This might go on for hours.
But the Alliance Think-tank is at work coming up with great new ways to protect Turtles (since no-one seems to care about the birds and other creatures), that some court, somewhere, sometime, might buy.
I just saw sketches for a Turtle Skateboard, which will allow the turtles to put two feet up on a fast-moving board, and then putter around with their other two feet until they are expected to hit, by Alliance statistics, up to 4 cm per hour. This is progress, although bulldozers and trucks can hit about 30 kph. The MOE calls this ‘turtle incentive’. “Hey, if you can’t learn to run the board, that’s your problem! Here comes the ‘dozer! Better get a move on!”
And there’s more. Thanks to my MOE spy-cam, I have observed the research and development team working on a method to strap helicopter blades to the turtle’s shell, which can operate remotely under human control. (Later, they can be operated by the turtles, in which case it will be raining turtles in the County as they plan their escape.)
“The biggest setback,” one engineer said, “is that we have to catch the little buggers first, so we can strap on the rotors. And, since they’re rare and endangered, they’re real hard to find. I told the bosses at MOE, ‘You know, it would be easier if we just kill em’, but they just rolled their eyes and said if it weren’t for the damn County people, that would have been done already.”
Well that was fun. But when the movie plays out, it will break your heart.
All of the local heroes who took on the enormous task of fighting an enormous mistake – the planting of an industrial wind farm in a nationally-designated Important Bird Area – should have statues erected at Ostrander Point. But that would be illegal, since it’s a Protected Area.
I’ve been politically aware since I was a teenager in 1968, and there’s been a lot to fight about since then. But never have I seen such an egregious abuse of power as I have during the Ostrander Point struggle.
We have a Ministry of the Environment, who cares nothing about the environment. Not only is the destruction unwarranted and unnecessary, but it violates their so-called set of purpose and principles.
We have a Ministry of Natural Resources which is quick to levy fines against a farmer clearing out a drainage ditch, since it is now host to frogs, and so has been designated ‘wetland’. Yet their face is turned to the wall, and they hum quietly to themselves, as the Crown Land at the Point is demolished, critters and all.
We have a Conservation Authority which lauds the preservation of those rare areas of rough, untouched land, and you don’t dare leave a coffee cup on one of their trails. They are all apparently in the lunch room, with their fingers in their ears.
How powerful is the Ministry of Energy that they can force their comrades-in-arms to lose their sight, hearing and speech?
This is not democracy at its worst. This is just simply not democracy.
It’s bullying.
Each of us has encountered a bull-headed person in our lifetime who – even when you prove they’re wrong – continued to believe what they wanted to believe, and drove it to the bitter end.
This is fine for individuals. I get that. People are people.
But the provincial government has not only lost its sense of purpose and principles – and its sense of decency – it has forgotten that we elect them to Govern – not to Rule.
We look to them for wisdom, vision and direction. Not for knee-jerk reactions to complex problems.
We are the Stewards of the Land. All of our government agencies have abandoned that role. The corporations just see the County as a potential money-maker.
We are threatened, and never thought our own government would be our worst enemy.
So the fight goes on, and it won’t be won in the voting booth, with a government that knows where the votes are, and how to win them.
And, clearly, they don’t care about us.
Filed Under: News from Everywhere Else • Steve Campbell
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