By Jospeh Kellard
Last Sunday night, after watching the games all day, I turned on Football Night in America, a show hosted by Bob Costas and other NFL commentators from the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. I tuned in for the highlights, but what I saw was very dim.
One of the show's attractions is the studio's stately backdrop, a window that looks out onto the GE skyscraper and its plaza, featuring a sculpture of a bronze gilded Prometheus. During the Christmas season, this scene turns into an ice skating rink, above which stands a 75 to 90-foot colorfully-lit Norway spruce. Come December, Rockefeller Center bathes in a magnificent display of decorative lights.
While it is not so lit up just yet, imagine my dismay nevertheless when Costas announced last Sunday that, as part of NBC's efforts to raise awareness about "climate change" and man's alleged contributory "carbon footprint" to this effect, Football Night in America would conduct the second half of its show with the lights turned off. As if taking such a measure wasn’t disgraceful enough, to do this in Manhattan's most brilliantly illuminated area is doubly disgraceful.
During this segment, Costas and his cohorts talked with Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show, who was bundled up in heavy clothes in Greenland near the North Pole. This was a preview to the morning news show's week-long reports on global warming. Lauer said something about ice sheets melting up there at a record pace …blah, blah, blah. Then we were shown Al Roker in a lush jungle somewhere (no doubt a "rainforest"), and Ann Curry was in Antarctica, both of them ready to report on its supposed effects in those regions.
Some of the guys in the studio with Costas, Keith Olbermann and Cris Collinsworth, were giggling at Laur standing next to an igloo in some desolate corner of the world. Then they all made light of doing the rest of the show in the dark, with flashlights.
Of course, what's sad is that displays like this, which are becoming evermore frequent in our post-Inconvenient Truth world, are no laughing matter. The actual truth is that fear-mongering environmentalists are so successfully scaring more and more Americans, in an attempt to induce guilt about their supposed overuse of such "conveniences" as light bulbs, that many are willfully following the greens back toward the Dark Ages.
Please post a comment about this column. For private comments, email Joseph Kellard at Theainet1@optonline.net.
Copyright © 2007 Joseph Kellard
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2 comments:
Once a person accepts an unearned guilt, he will feel a need to atone. The performance of sacrificial rituals, like shutting off lights, recycling etc., will be appealing to such people. Getting people to accept an unearned guilt is what the concept "The Environment" is all about.
I wonder how many people saw that and thought "that's nice of them " but who have no intention of turning off their own lights, and how many thought " what fools."
Mike N,
Thanks for your comment. From what I've heard and read, when gas prices go up, most Americans eventually keep on driving the same distances than they did when the prices were lower. Environmentalist propaganda aimed at instilling guilt has largely not stopped them. I just hope they don’t “live with the guilt,” so to speak; that is, believe that they’re doing something “wrong” by continuing with their usual routines, but feeling guilty for doing so. In other words, I hope their also driving those same distances guilt-free.
Let’s hope they do the same with all the other environmental calls for sacrifice, such as unnecessarily shutting off their lights.
Joseph Kellard
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