Smoke Gets in Their Eyes

“Beige sky. Stinky smell. The worst part is that the smell permeates the house.”

That is how I described the air quality in central New Jersey on Wednesday, the result of the wildfires in Canada.

Here’s how the sky looked across the river in New York City at about the same time that I was emailing the above statement:

                                           

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While battalions of residents of the east coast of the United States were coughing and choking, there was one clutch of cranks, though, who seemed to have no problem with the smoke and pollution: Fox Newsers. In fact they almost appeared to welcome the opportunity to hop on a favored hobbyhorse: the terrible business of wearing masks.

Fox News hosts on Wednesday made light of the public health warnings issued over the hazardous haze engulfing New York City, much like some of its personalities dismissed the risk of  COVID-19 during the coronavirus pandemic.

Jeanine Pirro, Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity all dismissed the city’s atrocious air quality — caused by wildfires in Canada— and mocked official advice to wear face masks amid the smoke that is expected to last for days.*

They found the new health crisis an opportunity for a political attack:

“While Americans choke on the smoke, the far left smells an opportunity. . . . Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.”

The real blame for the fire fiasco was easy for the Foxes to find: “our stupid neighbors up north.”

That declaration confounded me. I thought, following the great MAGA Muffin, that we were supposed to hate our neighbors to the south—the Mexicans—not the guys from the north who gave us ice hockey. 

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My own thought about having wildfire smoke from Canada engulf us here in the US was to recognize how all us Earthlings are interconnected. The sky over you today will be over me tomorrow. Just as your pollution will become my pollution, my pollution will become the problem of others. 

War, famine, and crime in Africa becomes a problem at the borders of Europe. Famine, hopelessness, and crime in Latin America becomes a problem at the borders of the United States. 

We are all globalists, whether we admit it or not. What happens there happens here. What happens here happens there.

There is only one sky. Canadian smoke is our smoke.

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* https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-hosts-most-predictable-094651893.html