Yes, it’s Earth Day again, the day we’re all supposed to think about Mother Gaia and what we can do to worship her in the correctly communal and communitarian manner. One little tip for you though (stolen shamelessly from PJ O’Rourke, as most peoples’ good jokes are): Have a look at any of the various events going on around the place and give the babe/beast ratio a quick check.

Things that are fashionable, ahead of the curve, have very high babe ratios: all the good looking women are there. When there’s a preponderance of mutts and beasts you know that the cause has passed its peak and become, like politics, showbiz for the ugly. Earth Day failed the ratio check starting some three decades ago and this year won’t be any different.

However, we do have something different for this year: a concerted attempt to use children as informers on their parents.

….launching this Earth Day is Green My Parents, a nationwide effort to inspire and organize kids to lead their families in measuring and reducing environmental impact at home. Not just on Earth Day, but every day.

Oh aye, what’s Green My Parents all about then?

…a movement that activates & enlists kids to lead their families in measuring & reducing environmental impact at home & “€œchallenge”€ their parents to share savings with kids.

Anybody else recognize this? Yes, that’s right, it’s straight out of the totalitarian playbook. Pretty much every foul dictatorship has used the children to tell on those parents who aren’t following the correct party line. Pavlik Morozov was the one the Soviet Union held up for praise. It is right and just that children should inform on their parents to the State: a more sickening traducement of family life it being difficult to imagine.

But of course it wasn’t just the Soviets that did this: the fascist regimes of mid 20th century Europe were just as joyous in their use of children to enforce conformity in parents. Pol Pot famously used children as informers to make sure that all did as commanded, the children even being given the power over who was executed.

The reason for all of this is of course that children are both very easy to lie to and also very easy to brainwash. Parents are, at least legally they are, competent adults and as such they’re capable of working out what is important and what isn’t. Green My Parents is actively suggesting that all should bathe in cold water, just as one of their more trivially stupid ideas. An adult would point out that returning to the medieval highly infrequent wipe with a cold rag just isn’t sensible. A child can be lied to until it actually believes that this will make a difference to the polar bears.

You’ll all have noted, at least those with school age children will have noted, the other part of this pincer movement: endless lessons in the more wacko forms of environmental nonsense and a marked lack of training in critical thinking or the evaluation of evidence. So now the brainwashed little poppets are to study you, inform and nag you and no doubt, coming soon, tell teacher that you had a hot shower.

One of the great books of the last century was George Orwell’s 1984. A book which contained a character called Parsons.

He is captured when his children claim that he repeatedly and unknowingly spoke against the Party in his sleep and he is last seen in the Ministry of Love, proud of having been betrayed by his orthodox children.

Crippled Jesus Christ on a crutch people, 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual!