The
World of Yesterday!
 If you disregard that fact that an estimated
60 million people died during World War
II the world was in pretty good shape in
1945. The planet's waters were free of
giant garbage patches, radioactivity, or
oil spills, and the drinking water wasn't
yet adulterated by phosphates or prescription
drugs. Glaciers were still glacial and
the jungles were still impenetrable. We'd
lost a couple of species by then, like
the quagga, but elephants, tigers, and
rhinos were doing just fine. There was
no automotive smog, no urban sprawl, no
mega-cities, no drive-by shootings, no
militarized police
and, in the United States, the Bill of
Rights was still taken seriously.
So what happened? How did the planet get
to be such a mess?
It's all Hitler's fault.
Because of him America went from being
largely agrarian in 1940 to becoming an
industrial juggernaut. When all those U.S.
GIs came
home from the war they wanted wives and
kids and cars and homes full of stuff to
help forget the war. Industry did its part
by shifting nimbly from building tanks
and
planes to
making refrigerators and TVs. "Longer,
lower, wider", "Keeping up with
the Joneses", and "planned obsolescence" became
our nation's watchwords.
We built roads for all those cars, even
an interstate system, which we filled with
trucks carting cargo from coast to coast,
belching CO2 all the way.
Commercial air travel advanced rapidly
as a side-benefit of military jet-engine
research and development, and now the skies
hum with 100,000 pollutant-spewing flights
per day.
America exported its desire for excess
to the Western world, which needed so many
new consumer goods that they all held their
noses and let the communist Chinese build
everything for them, a country now cloaked
in a coal-fired ecological nightmare that
kills over a half-a-million of its citizens
a year.
Without Hitler there would be no Israel,
and the Middle East would be a more peaceful
place. There might never have been oil
wars.
It's clear that the world would be a much
different place had it not been for Nazi
Germany, very likely a better place.
But keep in mind that Hitler only came
to power as a result of reparations placed
on Germany after World War One, and that
the Great War began only after the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Who was shot with a handgun. So now let's
talk about gun control and unforeseen consequences.
=Lefty=
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