The Front Page
Today’s Boston Globe announces that the air quality in New England these days is alarming in terms of smog. There will be more days, they say, when ‘residents are warned to limit their physical activity outdoors’. This is because in ‘March the federal government lowered the threshold for declaring the air unhealthy’.
So they’re telling us that even the feds have awakened to the filth we’re expected the breathe, and that we should therefore stay indoors and, um, play video games, or watch tv, rather than being able to be outdoors and getting some healthful exercise, perhaps.
The news, as so often, is disappointing because the writers fail to pursue the points and ask why it’s taken us so long to notice the obvious (Bush refused to revise the levels) and why the remedy is staying indoors rather than getting rid of the smog. New England doesn’t have that much industry any more, but it does have wind patterns that take most of the pollution from places like New York City and dump if squarely in central Massachussetts, for example, where those lovely expensive houses in the Hamptons can benefit.
Personally I don’t go outside that much at certain times of day because of lawnmowers with uncontrolled exhausts, and the cloying scent of too much barbecue lighter fluid slathered on briquets that neighbors seem to be unable to ignite. But that’s just a local problem….. perhaps.
I like clean air. Does anyone else?
