You know how it is, you read something and it makes no real impression for twenty minutes and then 'Ping' a low energy light bulb goes on in the remaining brain cells not yet dulled by high CO2 levels and you come up with one of those ideas for saving the planet. I was reading how Arnie was at last coming to the party on global warming, and among the posts responding to the item were some musing on the influence wife Maria may have had on this change of heart.
And it came to me. Do you know the story of Lysistrata dear readers? In 411 BC Athens and Sparta had been at war for twenty years and Aristophanes wrote a play about Lysistrata, an Athenian lady who was sick of 'the long war' and decided to end it. She gathered the other Athenian women together, told them there was to be no sex with men from now on until the war stopped. The war, not surprisingly, in no time at all, stopped.
Now it would be tempting to just apply this story to Iraq, and perhaps Molly Ivins or Cenk Uygur will do so. But my light bulb was even more radical. You see men are the ones causing global warming with their Hummers and their power stations and their energy companies and their demand for more and more growth in economies that are already running so fast as to need several other planets to supply resources. And it's men coming out and demanding that we go back to nuclear energy to solve whatever problems their gungho unregulated capitalism is causing. And it's men getting the huge payouts from energy companies. And it's men, from George Bush up, who are ranting about how there is no such thing as global warming and Kyoto is a conspiracy.
And it is women trying to deal with the effects of higher oil prices, and rising food costs, and, most of all, trying to deal with the idea that the children they have given birth to and raised and nurtured, are going to be faced with an unimaginably bad world to live in when they are grown up. What a waste.
So come on ladies, is Maria your Lysistrata? Is this what made Arnie change his mind? Call on Laura and Lynne to withhold sexual favours until their menfolk look up from their Iran war plans and agree to act on global warming. All of you women demand that your husbands and lovers take their own actions to stop global warming. No more sex boys until the Hummer is sold, the solar panels are installed, the energy saving devices are turned on, and America returns to the energy use levels of 1990.
Might reduce population, too.