There Is No Planet B

Not long before The Fall, one of our beloved kinjaverse authors penned a missive about the 10 most offensive running billboards outside their new roach-infested digs. Wonderful Pisctachios and Pom Pomegranate juice were found to be among the top 10, which was no surprise to me, seeing who the owners are: Stuart and Lynda Resnick. (He owns Paramount Pictures.) I can’t with these people, because I’ve known about this shit for YEARS (which is why they don’t get my business, no matter HOW much I love pistachios, because they grow 98% of them!), so I’ll just drop this here with a little pre-emptive rage-stroke warning:

Meet the California Couple Who Uses More Water Than Every Home in Los Angeles Combined

And move on to why I brought them to your attention: Farm workers and rural residents in the San Joaquin Valley (Central California) do not have access to usable tap water. They are often employees of two of the richest people in California.

On Friday morning, I was greeted with the news of three separate strains of e-coli outbreaks from Romain lettuce grown in Salinas, California. As I was muttering aloud about no wonder the food’s got e-coli when the workers don’t have access to running water, my fifth-grader started questioning my rant. Heartened, I offered to watch an explantory documentary with him on Netflix, Water & Power: A California Heist. We watched; he was enlightened.

Here’s the thing: It’s nothing new to me – I quit almonds way back because Blue Diamond did the same thing to the LA County water tableau; and Nestle (as Arrowhead) has been bottling water from the San Bernardino National Forest on a contract issued in 1909 while fighting the findings of a state investigation. (I’m a Southern California native; I’ve been around a long time, and I have a long memory.)

So, what do we DO about it? When corruption is THIS ingrained into EVERYTHING, what can we, YOU and I do about it? The rural communities of Central California don’t have access to clean drinking water, because it’s baked into the system, and has been for decades (do make sure to click on the in-depth report on-page once you click the link for the full eye-opening experience, because Chinatown’s got nothin’ on this):

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/thousands-san-joaquin-valley-have-unsafe-drinking-water-clean-water-close

And whatwith BoJo’s victory (and the Democrats’ inevitable inability to fumble the ball somehow over the line for the other team), another 4 years of Twitterfits and disintigrating rights seems likely, to say nothing of what the fossil fuel-powered, isolationist Wonder Twins will do to our planet, if they don’t manage to blow it up or melt it down.