As Darkness Descends

It’s bizarre how even supposedly “educated” people are paranoid, distrustful, & not believing in science. A few days ago, I discovered & shared with some of my e-mail contacts a video https://weather.com/health/video/researchers-find-dangerous-chemicals-in-natural-gas-used-in-homes which warns of the danger of cooking with gas in one’s home due to the chemicals released & left by the burning gas. Its explosive qualities & the danger of leaks were not even mentioned, although in this day & age I would not take anything for granted as being “common knowledge.”

Additionally, I stated that I had come to the same awareness years ago & had switched to using electricity for cooking back then, even when an electric stove was not available, as is the case in my present apartment. Every year or 2 I buy another countertop hotplate to avoid using gas. Unfortunately, they are of poor quality & rarely last more than 2 years.

One young man, however, whom I met several years ago when he interviewed me for the university radio station for which he worked as a student, wrote back with his conspiracy theory-laden comment. The conspiracy-theory is that the electric industry probably put together the video I watched & shared because it realized how much it will be able to increase prices for electricity as people pull away from gasoline car engines & switch to electric power for heating & other uses as well.

I can’t understand how using gas indoors as a fuel even dawned on anyone as safe to begin with, let alone accusing reports of its toxicity as being a conspiracy. This is like the spitbrained anti-vaxxers who would not be here if it were not for the umpteen vaccines they’ve received before being admitted to school. I grew up in the 1950s when polio was epidemic & how its spread was halted by the new vaccine.

What blew me away even more was seeing a movie the other day in which a family is roasting hot dogs over a gas fireplace!!! Hot dogs? Are those things even edible? Plus toxic fumes: YUM!....BAARRF!!!!

Electric cars or electric powered anything, by the way, only switches the fumes in our cities from car exhausts to power plant exhaust because so much of our electricity still comes from carbon-based fuels, so the ecological benefits are minimal. In fact, they may be more damaging as people junk perfectly good gasoline powered cars that still have many years of service left in them to appear being “with it”. I believe that newer electric cars are an April Fool’s joke on us all.

Electricity, however, does not require one to stand over a cooking pot inhaling exhaust fumes from a gas stove—how obvious!!!

Where has the sanity gone, the rationality, the enlightenment that I’ve been told arrived several centuries ago? Enlightenment, my ass! We are off to a strong start of times that will be so dark that no light will pierce it.

The glow which burns in a toddlers’ eyes as s/he discovers the joy of exploring & experiencing one’s environment is becoming of shorter & shorter duration & is coming into a long dark tunnel of misinformation, not knowing whom to believe, & trusting no one. I am so glad to be of an advanced age knowing that I won’t be dealing with this shit that much longer, but I cannot imagine how sane intelligent rational young folks are going to deal with the spitbrains who spread their nonsense like dogs peeing on every tree.

© Vytas Stoskus, 2022 www.stoskus.net/en/