Oh, you’re gonna love this.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – a bureau which, I suspect, has an average IQ somewhere around room temperature (that’s the “new” room temperature, officially lowered to save energy) – has proposed to introduce “stringent and unparalleled” regulation on one of the most dangerous, threatening, and onerous of rural byproducts.  Yes, that’s right: the EPA is now trying to save us all from the horrors of… farm dust.

I thought I’d seen it all in terms of absurdity, but this one takes the cake.  I mean, c’mon – DUST?

I can think of many things that rural people have to put up with that could stand a little more government regulation.  How about regulating the number of Halloween costumes you see in stores depicting redneck rubes with buck teeth and dubious lineage?  How about limiting the number of obnoxious tourists who lean out their car windows whenever they see a cow and yell “MoooOOOOoooo!!”?  How about reducing the number of copies of Green Acres, Hee Haw, or Petticoat Junction DVD’s sold through Costco, since this is apparently where most city folks gain their comprehensive and accurate knowledge of ruralites?

But no, you’ll never see these annoyances regulated by the EPA.  Instead, in its infinite wisdom, the feds would rather regulate… farm dust.

Which leads to the interesting question of HOW?  How do you regulate dust?  Has anyone every actually stopped to consider the logistics involved?

Should farmers spray chemicals on their fields to keep the dust down while plowing or harvesting this nation’s food?  Oooh, the EPA (and the environmentalists) would just love that.  Or what about the millions of miles of dirt roads in the rural heartland of America – should they all be paved?  Watered down daily?  Care to guess how much that would cost?

And what will be the threshold which defines how much dust is too much?  What will be the punishment for those who create excessive quantities of dust?  Jail time?  Steep fines?  Community service?  Vacuuming?  Uh…dusting?

The question I would most like to ask the nitwits who thought of this is, why do you care if rural areas are dusty?  You don’t live in rural areas.  You don’t have to live with farm dust.  So what do you care if the rest of us do?

I mean honestly, think about it.  These big city liberal twits who populate the EPA aren’t affected in the slightest by farm dust.  So how did something like this come about?  How could someone propose to regulate dust with a straight face?  And why weren’t they laughed out of the room?  (Answer: because everyone else in the room also hails from the Big City and therefore thought it was a spiffy idea.)

I get the impression this legislation was put forth by some city-slicker who (for mysterious reasons known only to himself) ventured forth out of his air-conditioned tower and soiled his tires on a country road where he had the misfortune to be caught behind a battered farm pickup.  Coughing at the natural result, he decided to do the only thing a lame-brained government bureaucrat can do, and that’s to impose bureaucracy.  He’ll show that slow-brained redneck poop-kicker in the truck who’s boss.  He’ll make dust illegal, by golly.

At least, that’s the only explanation I can fathom.  If someone can come up with a stupider scenario on how this originated, I’d like to hear it.

I don’t suppose it’s occurred to the Einsteins in the EPA that dust is a byproduct of farming.  And much of the work farmers do (I know this may come as a surprise) involves producing food.  As in, eating.  Eating is, presumably, an activity in which the EPA twits participate once in awhile.  Therefore it would not be in their best interest to make the production of food any more complicated than it already is… unless the EPA Einsteins have the lamentable notion that food is produced in the back rooms of grocery stores, as so many urban public school graduates sadly believe.

So I’ve decided that city people need a similarly invasive and absurd series of regulations.  Just to balance things out.  So how about this?  I propose to introduce stringent and unparalleled legislation to regulate… gossip.

Yes, gossip.  All those breaks around the water cooler?  Clampdown.  Text messaging?  Better conform to the stacks of new rules and regulations that will be imposed to make sure that gossip doesn’t spread.  Emails?  Oooh, don’t you dare press “Send All” less that dust… er, gossip be spread beyond the bounds of government regulation.

In other words, gossip is a byproduct of the urban work environment just as dust is a byproduct of the rural work environment.  Regulate it!

No one in the country makes dust for the pure and simple joy of making dust.  It’s just an occupational hazard of driving large machinery over unpaved ground in order to cultivate, plant, and harvest food.  Dust happens.

Sure dust can be annoying.  It makes people choke, it settles on things and sometimes clogs them, and it can cloud the scenery.  Sometimes there are even dust storms, during which wind-whipped dust blankets an area and makes a big mess.

I’ll be magnanimous and assume that no one in the cities gossips for the pure and simple joy of gossiping (yeah right).  Gossip is just… well an occupational hazard of cramming a bunch of people together in tall buildings with no escape for a minimum of eight hours a day.  Gossip just happens.  It makes people choke, it settles on things and sometimes clogs them, and it can cloud the scenery.  Sometimes there are even gossip storms, during which wind-whipped gossip blankets an area and makes a big mess.  Savvy?

Certainly gossip has a greater degree of juicy enjoyment than dust, but it still bears a lot in common.  It’s insubstantial, it messes up everything, and it’s extremely difficult to clean up or eliminate once you spread it.  Frankly I’d really like to see the EPA address this problem.

But how can the EPA regulate gossip?  The same way it proposes to regulate dust: It can’t.

Obviously compliance with regulations against dust – or gossip – is impossible.  Improbable.  Impractical.  The only thing the EPA can do is to impose ridiculously cumbersome paperwork and documentation and filing requirements and (most importantly) fines in order to comply with some dumb-ass idea that should never have existed in the first place.  But the EPA won’t care if these onerous impositions bleed the heart and soul out of the rural workforce.  They don’t live here.  They don’t have to put up with it.

But they do have to live with gossip, which is why I think it should be regulated in a similar manner.

On second thought, if the EPA was interested in legislating something totally and completely impossible to comply with, may I humbly suggest they introduce legislation to regulate asinine, pointless, and impossible legislation?  Now that’s a federal mandate I could live with.

(Cough cough.)

Tags: Gals

Thursday, August 5th, 2010 - 8:59 PM
Category: Government.

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