Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Culture Wars

Showering with John Edwards

by Clay Staggs

There are two phenomena at work in America right now that are so inwardly destructive that I’m not sure the republic can survive them. The first is our modern higher education system. The other is the environmentalist movement. Apparently the two have merged with frightening results at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Every reader of this blog needs to take three minutes and click this link to read about Oberlin’s “new sustainability house — SEED, for Student Experiment in Ecological Design.”

Now, I’ll issue my standard request for folks not to hear what I’m not saying. I am not saying that there’s anything wrong with building houses to conserve energy. I am not saying that wasting energy or polluting the planet is good. Conservation and being a good steward of the earth is very good.

But, leave it to our educated classes to take a simple concept with simple application and go completely and utterly overboard with it. Under no circumstances whatsoever would any sensible human being put a picture of John Edwards (or anyone else for that matter, but Edwards is particularly egregious) over their shower as a means of water conservation:

Rebecca Bob-Waksberg, a resident in this house says that “[n]o one wants to linger in the shower with someone staring down from the ceiling … . “You could also look at it another way,” she said, “that John Edwards is encouraging me to take a shorter shower.” Why Mr. Edwards? “He had the strongest global warming policies of any of the candidates,” Mr. Brown said.

Lest you think that I’m nit-picking, consider these other features of the house:

1. There are bricks in the toilet to keep water flow down. Waste water is captured in buckets from the sink and tub drains and used to increase the toilet flow. Sanitary!

2. Despite the house being divided, one side agreed to unplug its refrigerator, which is just an “energy-sucker.”

3. In the winter, the thermostat is on 60.

The only thing missing, apparently, is the altar for Gaia worship.

Lest you think this the work of over-eager college students, consider the comments of the professor:

“This is a generation that is watching the world come undone,” said David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin. Projects like the Oberlin house, he said, are “helping them understand how to stitch the world together again.” Dr. Orr’s course in ecological design became the incubator for the house when Mr. Brown and the two other founders of SEED.

So, if we all time our showers for 3 minutes (unless, of course, you have long curly hair), then that’ll stitch the world back together again? One might think that simply not bathing would be even more helpful in binding up the world’s wounds. But wait, they’ve already gone there:

At Oberlin last year, some students in the winning dorm [in the dorm-energy use Olympics - sigh] did not shower for two weeks, officials said.

I hardly know on whom to heap more scorn, the students or their (alleged) teachers, because nobody in this whole sorry scene has any common sense - let alone true higher education - behind them, only political correctness. Get this, from Lucas Brown, one of the residents:

“It’s not about telling people, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that,’ ” Mr. Brown said. “It’s about fitting sustainability into our own lives.” And hoping, he added, “that a friend will come over, recognize that it’s fun, start doing it, and then a friend of theirs will start doing it.”

Having John Edwards stare at me while I take a 3 minute shower is NOT fun. I will not start doing it. I will NOT unplug either of my two refrigerators. My thermostat will NOT be on 60 in the winter. Am I the only one that sees this for the insanity that it is?

The students and their teachers are not living in reality. Their ignorance is exceeded only by their self-congratulating egos. Despite protestations that this isn’t about telling anybody what to do, that’s EXACTLY what it is. The clear implication is that to keep the world from splitting apart, we’ve all got to live like cavemen. After all, what of those of us (like me) who simply refuse to live that way? If the world’s on the line, doesn’t somebody have to compel me to get with the program? Indeed, that’s why they need this:

By next fall, the house’s 24-hour energy-use monitoring system will be fully up and running. Every turn of the faucet, every switch of a light, will be recorded, room by room.

Sort of enviro-1984, huh? These students are probably too busy with environmental courses to have been bothered with literature, though.

When you stop to think about the entire body of knowledge of Western Civilization and the centuries of learning in its universities, that we have come to this is truly and deeply depressing.