When I was a wee lad in elementary school — this was back when global cooling was dogma — we kids had all heard about killer bees. You may remember the story: Scientists in Brazil had bred the African honey bee with a European honey bee and succeeded in creating, well, a really mean bee. These hybrids then escaped from their captors and started spreading throughout the Americas, bullying the nice bees and occasionally killing people. This prompted some sensationalistic stories in the media about the perils of these impudent insects, and we kids were scared. Would K-i-l-l-e-r B-e-e-s (gasp!) be the end of us? I suppose it could have made a good movie. The “Bees from Brazil,” anyone?
Of course, it all seems a bit ridiculous now; the reality is that bees are more imperiled in the world today than man. But little threats seems like the End Times to little children. Thankfully, however, we had an old-school teacher (who also happened to be an old schoolteacher) who told us that she’d been around a long time and heard lots of doomsday stories and that we needn’t worry. We wouldn’t suffer death by bee.
Sadly, today many teachers aren’t soothing children but scaring them, in an effort to transform them into good little global-warming fanatics. And a good example of this is presented by New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser. Shocked to learn that her daughter’s school had taught the girl to sing, “. . . You can hear the warning — GLOBAL WARMING . . .,” she writes:
By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:
A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called “The Warming Song,” at a concert for parents.
B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.
C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.
Yes, well, as Al Gore has informed us, “The debate is over.”
Speaking of which, there’s a good way to end the debate with your child. After reassuring him that global warming won’t kill all and sundry, simply make the left’s lifestyle alteration demands real to him. Say, “All you have to do is give up the television, the computer with your video games, heat and air-conditioning and walk and ride your bike everywhere you go. Then, if we junk our car and live in a grass hut, we can reduce our carbon footprint to the level of the average Tanzanian.
Students are exposed to intense propaganda. Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth (never was a work so inappropriately named) has been shown to schoolchildren, and one of the few bright sides is that a judge in England ruled that the film was “alarmist” and “exaggerated” and contained so many errors that schools had to accompany it with a warning. Then, following Gore’s lead, his work’s producer, Laurie David, wrote a warmist children’s book titled “Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.”
Articulating what inspired her to pen it she told Publisher’s Weekly, “kids also are the Number 1 influence on their parents, so if you want to reach the parents, go to the kids.”
Funny, though, there was a time when parents were the Number 1 influence on their kids. I should also add that in about a decade or so, these kids will be voters.
While children are excellent targets for propaganda, they’re also excellent props. A good example is the opening film at the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) in Copenhagen, “Please Help the World,” shown below.
It features a cutie patootie little girl who hears some dire warmist pronouncements on television and then, upon sinking into the arms of Morpheus, has a nightmare. She finds herself contending with all sorts of scary weather phenomena, from desert sands to an earthquake to an ark-worthy flood. She then awakens and pours her heart out to her father, and they both log onto the COP15 website so the antediluvian old man can get educated about the diluvian peril (hint: that’s how you do it, kids!). The video closes with her and other children pleading, “Please help the world.” It’s that heart-tugging message that became so common in the ‘90s, “Do it for the children.”
Conservationist John Burroughs said in 1877, “I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.” Today the inheritors — and perverters — of his movement are instilling that anxiety in the young. And you should be anxious, too. Because warmist propaganda is being used to steal our money, our economic fortunes and our children’s future.
