Hey, says the EPA, we’ve got it covered. Relax! They crew up, we fine ‘em. Just fine ‘em, that’s all, and it’s fine again. Fining makes it all just fine. If a man were caught fanning the flames of a fire he had just started in a wing of the White House, he wouldn’t just be fined. First, he would be stopped. Oh, I know, his family would then be deprived of a breadwinner, and his employees would be without a boss.
His detention would put people out of work, in fact, because this guy turns out to be head of a fire-starting ring that employs twenty-five hundred people in one plant alone, and he’s the CEO of a corporation that includes six other fire-starting centers across the nation. Think of the hardship on all those workers. No, try, just try, please to think of the hardship brought to the relatives of the survivors—if there are any—and the hardship that spreads to the children of those workers and the children of their neighbors, when the fires destroy every single abode, fill the air, EVERYONE’S air, with toxic fumes, scorch the earth so thoroughly that crops will no longer grow, leech the attendant poisons into the water table and into the streams and lakes that supply cities and devastate all the forests within reach, so that there are no longer materials to build new homes and schools, and weaken the living so that they have no strength to build or work, even if they had the means. All as the result of a deliberately set fire. Hey, this guy has been setting these fires for years. Inspectors have been on to him for decades. He’s been warned, man, and we’ve fined him regularly, every year, yeah, and the stiffer amount each time, too. Don’t think this guy hasn’t paid. HASN’T PAID?! That’s it? You’ve continued to fine him and warn him, by God, but eh pesky so-and-so just kept doing it, so we rapped his knuckles every six months or so and imposed another fine every year, you betcha, so he ain’t getting away with anything. NOT while we’re watching!
Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You’ve been on this guy’s tail for over ten years, while he’s been setting these horrible fires, but never found it necessary to stop him until he set this fire at the White House? Who is he, anyway? He’s the president of the tobacco company, the CEO of General Motors, the owner of the chemical plant, the FDA official who sets standards that lie and compromise everyone’s health, the Federal official whose guidelines for air, land and water pollution are powerless suggestions that clean and protect nothing. He’s every smoker who smokes anywhere in public. He’s you. He’s me. If you or I pollute or smoke or destroy anything on the planet. He’s the poacher, the governor who fails to stop the poacher, the fisherman who rapes the sea killing dolphins and whales, and he’s the President who fails to provide food, housing and medical care for all of his people. He’s you. He’s me, if we fail to stop the fire-starter, starting with stopping you and me.