My High School is a Wal-Mart Parking Lot

So I visited my hometown and discovered that both elementary schools I attended and my high school are closed. I know times change, but to see a Wal-Mart parking lot where classrooms once buzzed and, worse, the Wal-Mart store itself engulfing the ballfield where I used to boot groundballs on a regular basis – well, do I need to say more?

I happen to like Wal-Mart in spite of all the propaganda floating around attempting to discredit them because of their non-union culture. Wal-Mart provides low prices to financially struggling families and acceptable employment to people between jobs or on their first jobs.

But a Wal-Mart where I once blew a game with an errant throw? Please don’t wipe my memories away!

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Back in 1969 my high school that is now occupied by the Wal-Mart parking lot heavily promoted an all-school event to arouse awareness of what was a very real problem in the environment I endured in my youth.

The infamous Love Canal was just a few miles from that high school. A few blocks in a different direction (upwind from us) chemical plants spewed every noxious fume known to man, not just soot, which was bad enough on the lungs, but other unknown rot and corrosives that could eat the paint off cars.

I used to cross on foot industrial slag heaps walking to school, not to mention the continual stream of effluent that those factories released into the Great Lakes.

Given all this, I absolutely had to lend whatever help I could to the Earth Day efforts. It was my duty to help clean up the mess in that industrial town, not to mention to help prevent the next ice age.

We have come a long way since then. Lake Erie once again has fish. The Cuyahoga River no longer catches fire. Cars produce just a fraction of the pollutants they once did.

Time to cheer, right?

Well, not exactly. We have now “discovered” that carbon dioxide is a threat to human existence! Who knew that saving the world from a new ice age would hasten the age of global warming? Now we’re all going to fry!

We have come a long way from the days of sulfuric acid and lead emissions to fretting over cow flatulence and sheep belches. I would find this to be funny, but the policy implications of the life altering effects of cow manure remind me that the spirit of insanity is alive and well.