We're Getting Screwed

As a Pennsylvania citizen, voter, and activist, I am deeply disturbed and embittered by the rapid, unjust imposition of gas drilling by hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on communities in our state. On the scale this is happening, fracking poses untested but potentially catastrophic risks to air and water; it virtually overturns the lives of rural communities everywhere it’s applied. Yet the Penn State Extension website gives us an extensive list of “what to expect”—thereby implying free citizens must simply “expect” cataclysmic changes that could lay waste their communities and their state’s environment without consultation or choice. I vigorously reject that implication.
Why should I, a free U.S. citizen and living person who must actually breathe air and drink water, bow slavishly to the will of fictitious legal persons known as “corporations”? Why indeed, when behind the corporate fiction lurk simply other citizens (many of them rich enough to buy legislatures) who have their own interests—and clearly neither mine nor the common good—at heart? Thomas Jefferson warned against looming threats to liberty posed by “large enterprises,” and Abraham Lincoln against corporations, already dangerously vast in his day, by name. By stark contrast with these preeminent “friends of the people,” today’s “representatives” simply fiddle out the corporate tune we must dance to. Feeling cruelly betrayed, “we the people” are starting to fondly recall a Revolution fought against “taxation without representation”—which is precisely what most Pennsylvanians face today.
If you doubt my words, that’s only because habitually hearing only corporate voices has deafened you to real people’s. But get this on your radar fast: active citizens of Pennsylvania—not wingnut kooks, but some of the best and the brightest—are in revolt. Model parents, churchgoers, professional people, hard-working taxpayers who’ve never committed a crime are seriously discussing invoking their Second Amendment rights or training for civil disobedience. And usually the discussion isn’t about whether a revolt over fracking is justified (that’s simply assumed), but whether the election of those who reject a moratorium on fracking—or the blatant tyranny of forced pooling—should be the trigger event. Most telling to me were the thoughts of a dental hygienist, a mother I’d never have suspected of thinking such things, who said, “Remember, I’m not just an environmentalist; I’m a gun owner too.”
Don’t dare insult my intelligence by asking me to see both sides. I take great pains to inform myself on vital issues, and know when my basic rights are under siege. Besides a love of natural beauty and a vivid sense of community rights, a single reading of the series on fracking by the online journal ProPublica—the only online journal to win a Pulitzer—ought to convince any thinking person that horizontal fracking (the type being done in PA) is a young, largely untested technology that plays Russian roulette with our state’s air and water. Why else has Congress commissioned the EPA to do a thorough “lifecycle” study of the process—a study the EPA acknowledges is desperately needed?
Pending completion of that EPA study, to allow widespread fracking in the face of Pennsylvania’s woefully inadequate regulatory and enforcement regime (and how can the state regulate what no one yet understands?) is a betrayal of your Constitutional mandate to defend our lives and well-being. A moratorium—the sooner the better—is the only morally permissible course. If a moratorium isn’t passed soon, expect to jail some of our best citizens, or needlessly shed the blood of others simply exercising their Second Amendment right to defend their lives and property.
I defy you to find a single fault of fact or logic in what I have said. You had better answer me, as your silence will simply imply consent—and I will hold you responsible for the quality and seriousness of your answer. And FYI, I am sending a copy of this, under the title “An open challenge to our legislators,” to every media outlet I can think of in the state.
Sincerely and with intent to act,
Patrick Walker, Factoryville
(570) xxxxxxxx
pjwalkerzorro@yahoo.com