April will be long over when you read this, but what an amazingly fecund 30 days it was this year. April was “Child Abuse Prevention Month.” The first week of April was “Read Aloud Week,” the last week was National Library Week, the 28th was “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” (which was very hard on us, being the parents of four boys), and the last day was the beginning of “Clean Air Week.” What an embarrassment of riches! I do not want to know who comes up with all of these important events, but it is probably someone salaried by the taxpayers.

But I can tell you one thing: I absolutely refused to read aloud to my kids that week. And another thing: I prevent their abuse not just one month of the year, but all 12, by keeping them out of the public school system. I also censor what they check out at the library. And I think I will smoke a cigarette sometime during Clean Air Week, even though I gave it up 17 years ago.

What kind of stupidity is all this “declared” hogwash? Do people really pay attention to this rot and read aloud to their kids simply because the paper reported on this fatuous nonsense? Were we supposed to be extra vigilant in April and report our neighbors when we saw them swat little Johnnie (or Joannie), whom we consider to be a brat and well-deserving of that and more?

Maybe the “abuse” we were really meant to prevent in April was that of our “inner child.” (These are ambiguous times.) Maybe April was the month that we were supposed to go out and buy our “child” that new dress the evil parent promised she would buy but never did, thus scarring us for life (especially if one was a male child!).

As if all of the above was not enough, I discovered that another high holy day falls in April. No, not Easter. I am talking about Earth Day. But we here in Colorado, the State of Hate, don’t just celebrate Earth Day. We have Earth Week. Aside from a lot of “acoustic” singers (as opposed to what, the deaf signing to “We are the World”?) and the obligatory tree planting, I think my favorite was a “dumpster dive”; people were asked to rummage through a dumpster “to remove all things that can be recycled.” (Black tie required.)

In the Earth Week ’94 supplement to the paper, we were also given tips for recycling. A very timely one was “Document Destruction: for confidential documents.” So we can see that our esteemed President and his main squeeze were just being “green” about all that boring Whitewater stuff. Shredding is de rigueur and so very sensitive to our Mother. It turns thousands of sheets of damning evidence into millions of innocent little worms of paper. The ultimate in recycling would be to dye them in lovely earth tones and sell them for Easter baskets next year. Who knows, you might be the first on your block to get a peek at the Vince Foster files, buried oh so carefully under carob bunnies, free range eggs, and rice syrup candies. Happy Easter!

With summer coming so quickly on the heels of Earth Month, there were also important ads about the evils of sending grass clippings to the landfill, where they supposedly take up 17 percent of the space. Not organic enough, I guess. No, if you are to be regarded as anything other than an insensitive consumer of the goddess Gaia, you must now mulch. Mulching involves spending up to one thousand dollars on a new mower. “We are gradually getting better and better at recycling, but we need to encourage people to use less [sic] of the recyclable products in the first place,” said a local “environmental education specialist.” This is an idea called “precycling,” which I thought meant dreaming about going on a bike ride. Guess not.

It really bugs me to have other people “encourage” me. Nothing is stopping these people from never using anything ever again. Unfortunately, there isn’t much stopping them from trying to stop me from using things either, which is their real goal. And that does not “encourage” me one little bit.

Another goal is deep indoctrination, which can only be achieved in cults or public schools, both of which are increasingly indistinguishable from one another, “in 1970,” states Mr. Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson, “no environmental education was going on in the grade schools and high schools in America. Now, it is taught from kindergarden through high school across the country. Now there are literally thousands of schools with environmental teaching going on.” Of course, the fact that our children are increasingly illiterate and morally stupefied is of no relevance to Mr. Earth Day. By goddess, as long as they can recycle and buy organic, what else really matters?

As long as enough people feel “encouraged” by such social engineering, we will continue down the broad path to destruction. The destruction of freedom and intelligent public discourse. The destruction of our children’s minds. The destruction of our future. It will be a path littered with good intentions and old bagging lawn mowers.