This Washington Post article about public planning in Virginia shows how bad the Aggressively Stupid has become. All across the Commonwealth, public meetings are being disrupted by deranged Tea Partiers who think public planning is some kind of sinister plot directed by the United Nations and the environmental movement. The worst of it is taking place in Hampton Roads, which is sinking even as the ocean level is rising. This combination necessitates pro-active planning.
The residents’ opposition has focused on a central point: They don’t think climate change is accelerated by human activity, as most climate scientists conclude. When planners proposed to rezone land for use as a dike against rising water, these residents, or “new activists,” as [acting executive director of the Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission, Lewis] Lawrence calls them, saw a trick to take their property.
“Environmentalists have always had an agenda to put nature above man,” said Donna Holt, leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a tea party affiliate with 7,000 members. “If they can find an end to their means, they don’t care how it happens. If they can do it under the guise of global warming and climate change, they will do it.”
Unfortunately, Donna Holt and many of her 7000-strong tea partiers don’t realize that they want to build a dike for the same reason people always want to build dikes: to protect the property behind the dike. What kind of Stupid does it take to motivate a person to get off their butt, drag it to a public meeting and yell about nonsense like this?
When planners redesignated property as a future flood zone, activists said officials were acting on a hoax. They argued in meetings and on Web sites that local planners are unwitting agents of Agenda 21, a United Nations environmental action plan adopted in 1992 that the activists see as a shadowy global conspiracy to grab land and redistribute wealth in the United States.
I suppose it was generous of them to call these public planners “unwitting” agents. They’re just poor dumb schmucks who have been indoctrinated into believing things like water-level readings.
I can kind of understand when people are marshaled to fight against environmental causes that will hurt the profit margins of the oil and gas industry. But this has extended to fighting against flood protection. It’s incredible how easy it is to make dumb people.
