President Trump’s “dirty water rule” is a premier example of the vortex of tragically ill-timed, incredible bad luck that’s sucking America and the world into a whirlpool of environmental nightmares. What’s worse is that murderous racists, vile misers and assorted anti-science zealots are stirring that lethal vortex for all they’re worth, just when sanity, intellectual rigor and disciplined self-control are needed most.
Just when New Mexico and the Southwest have been almost flattened by rising heat and one of the worst droughts in a millennium, a time when every drop of clean water is more precious than gold, and just when the Colorado River is experiencing a serious shrinkage in its delivery of clean water to more than 40 million people in seven Western states, the Trump administration’s EPA has finalized a rule that allows companies to pollute the nation’s wetlands and ephemeral and intermittent streams at will. These precious water resources, formally protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972 and its 2015 revisions, are now more endangered than they’ve been since President Nixon’s veto of the act in October of 1972. The veto was overridden first by the U.S. Senate, which had voted unanimously to approve it, and then by the U.S. House with a vote of 247 to 23.
For New Mexicans, the Trump administration’s environmental idiocy makes more than 90% of New Mexico’s intermittent and ephemeral waterways, along with more than half of our wetlands, vulnerable to polluters like the oil and gas industry, according to Amigos Bravos, a New Mexico river conservation organization. Of course all polluters always vigorously deny any accusation of environmental perfidy, even when the data are logically irrefutable.
The Department of Energy denied allegations that it had systematically dumped millions of gallons of radioactive water and other pollutants during the Cold War into Tijeras Arroyo, a partially intermittent waterway that passes not 50 feet from Mountain View Elementary School, and into the Rio Grande after draining some 100 miles of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. In 1982, the drinking water well at Mountain View Elementary was condemned and closed for undisclosed contamination.
And what seemed to have at least a high probability of being true in the 1980s is now overwhelmingly obvious to everyone who’s not been ideologically blinded. It’s as if Trump and the Republican Party has so mind-scrambled the American people with their endless madcap distractions and perpetual spewing of disinformation that we have become willing victims of America’s worst exploiters who dump their excrement wherever they like, even in drinking water. They then expect us to spend millions, and sometimes billions, of tax dollars to clean it up, which we have no choice if we don’t want our cities and ourselves to wither from dehydration.
American political philosopher Noam Chomsky has a particularly clear-headed view of the current state of the American mind. Propaganda, he says, is “to democracy what violence is to dictatorship.” Chomsky knows that the almost autonomic response to power is to at first subordinate yourself to it. We all have that tendency until it hurts too much not to resist. Propaganda, the tool of the powerful, bathes our minds in soothing rhetorical goo and the seemingly blessed relief of nonsensical false doubts. You may have opposing views from time to time, but the pressure of constant propaganda is so intense, Chomsky says, quoting George Orwell, that it makes you “internalize…the values (of the propaganda) so that there are certain things [you] wouldn’t dare to say or even to think.”
So when the EPA writes a rule that allows polluters of do whatever they will with fragile waterways and wetlands, many Americans apparently find it impossible to accept what’s really going on — the poisoning of drinking water for profit by Big Money Corporations who make fortunes from never paying a dime for cleaning up their pollution. These are the “corporate persons” that tend to anonymously fund Republican candidates.
The Trump dirty water rule could have a disastrous impact on important tributary streams in New Mexico, like the Santa Fe River, the Gallinas that runs through Las Vegas and the Rio Fernando around Ranchos de Taos.
Amigos Bravos reports that “at least 280,000 people in New Mexico receive drinking water from sources that rely at least in part on ephemeral and/or intermittent tributaries.” Only the Rio Grande, Canadian, Pecos, Gila and San Juan rivers will retain Clean Water Act protection under the Trump EPA’s dirty water ruling.
I guess over a quarter million New Mexicans who depend on hundreds of intermittent and ephemeral stream systems don’t matter in the eyes of Republican anti-environmentalists. Will we ever be able to cut through their mind-fuddling propaganda and say, in our own way, the emperor has no clothes?
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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