Sunday, April 22, 2007

Three salutes over the weekend

There were three important celebrations and anniversaries this weekend. 
 
First, this is the time for marijuana legalization events.  Maybe I'll post more on that later and I'm hoping to write on the related issue of industrial hemp (a very valuable non-narcotic variety used for fiber, paper etc.) legalization later on. 
 
April 22 is the anniversary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's birth in 1870.  He was born in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk, I assume in honor of Lenin's family name), on Russia's Volga River.  He went on to lead the great socialist revolution that created the longest lasting workers' state, and made many useful innovations in revolutionary communist theory and practice.  These include his analysis of monopoly capitalism (see Imperialism, online at www.marx2mao.org), linking the proletarian revolutionary movements in the most developed capitalist countries with the national liberation movements in the colonies, strengthen both movements for freedom and democracy, and the two-stage theory of revolution in oppressed nations.  
 
Now to the most popular anniversary.  As most people know, today is also Earth Day, I think first established in the USA in 1970.  A lot of media outlets are portraying it as a celebration of the living Earth, which it is, but I think of it more as a day to work to conserve the environment.  This usually involves picking up trash, which I did yesterday with NE Creek Stream Watch, or lobbying politicians for better environmental protections.  I think the most pressing environmental issue now is climate change caused by humans, and it is good that there is more focus on that this year.  I am trying to reduce my carbon footprint, though I admit that I'm not doing enough, and we should all cooperate and work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Otherwise we risk a world with more natural disasters and disease, the loss of many species (probably leaving more of the weedy species we tend not to find so beautiful), and coastal flooding that will even sink some nations.  There is even a possibility that warming will actually trigger the next ice age, rather than putting it off, as some reactionaries say they think will happen.  Then we in northern North America and Europe, who caused most of the carbon dioxide pollution, will really be in trouble.  If we work to prevent this, we will have more leverage on India and China to get them to industrialize more responsibly than we did.  I also plan to write on global warming for  Alliance! later this year.              

1 comment:

Frank Partisan said...

Lenin will not be remembered for 2 stage revolution. He repudiated that doctrine later.