When A Brutal Case Of Poison Ivy Turned An Environmentalist Bad - Misery Always Trumps Doing Good

The world is Gaia, the Earth Mother, a universal whole, a One, a miraculous integrity of living things.  It knows when a butterfly has hurt its wing, when a fish jumps in the ocean, and when a sparrow drops from a tree. Man is the interloper who trespasses on Creation, the damager, and the destroyer. 

These were the thoughts of Leverett Parsons as he drove to the Shenandoah, the valley in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, his place of solace, peace, and belonging. As he left Washington far behind, a feeling of serenity and happy expectation came over him.  K Street, the Capitol, and the White House were only traces in the rearview mirror as the developments along the Interstate finally began to thin, the rolling hills of Virginia extended to the far horizon, and the first peaks of the mountains, rose bluish in the morning light.  He was home. 

Lev Parsons had been a lifelong environmentalist, at least for the thirty or so years that it had become a cause celebre. There was something existential about the issue of the environment that civil rights never achieved.  A black man in the ghetto was nothing compared to the warming planet, the extinction of species, and the fiery end to Nature.  He immediately regretted these thoughts.  The black man deserved more currency and attention, but the Earth? That was another thing altogether, the home to billions, the blue marble in a marvelously precise elliptical orbit around the sun, turning brown and grey.  

The black man was once his hero.  A refugee from the tribal simplicity and beauty of the African forest, enslaved and brought to the Americas, his native sensibilities had for decades been dismissed as primitive, Stone Age, animalistic grunts; and Parsons and his equally committed colleagues had worked tirelessly to raise him to his proper place atop the human social pyramid.  Parsons had gone to the barriers with his black brothers, and fought tirelessly for restitution, reparations, and white apologies. 

Until Black Lives Matter showed up, an arriviste in the civil rights struggle, out more for mayhem and bank accounts than racial purpose.  There was that LaShonda Evans, a prima donna wig-wearing, high-toned black woman who scammed millions from her followers.  Gone were the days of Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and Jesse Jackson, true integrationists who hoped for a united, peaceful, and racially harmonious world.  LaShonda and her claques, a cabal of ghetto queens who hooked themselves to her star and who plundered and pillaged until the cupboard was bare, were finally caught, tried, and sentenced; but not before they turned over the reins to another weaselly crew of make-money-quick pimps. 

No, thought Lev, it was time to move up and on, and after a brief sojourn with the LGBTQ+ movement, he turned to environmentalism.  To be honest he was never comfortable with being ogled by the gay men in his office and was disgusted by the posters of fisting and water sports posted in the hallways.  Gay men had their rights which had been trampled by the homophobic white population, but sexual 'alteration' made him shudder.  Just the thought of his penis....and there at that thought he shook his head and thought of hot chocolate or Bermuda.  As much as he sympathized with the movement, he simply could not be part of it and part of 'them'. 

And so it was that he took up the cudgel of environmentalism.  He came by it naturally.  Although a city boy, born and raised on the Upper West Side of New York, his favorite outings were to the Adirondacks, a patch of the Appalachian spine high enough to have vistas but tame enough for leisurely walks. If what environmentalists said was true, the Adirondacks would soon be cinder and ash.  

More than just that unsettling thought, the philosophical casing that had been put around the issue - its existential focus - appealed to him.  It wasn't just that his hiking trails and mountain-top cabins were at risk, but the world itself.  Global warming was real, imminent, and fatal. 

Environmentalism as a social issue was particularly compelling because of its inclusiveness.  You couldn't really think about the warming planet without considering the reasons why - the unsustainable use of carbon-based fuels was only an expression of the predatory, manipulative capitalism that underlay it; the very capitalism that was at the heart of forced labor, segregation, and the perpetual enslavement of the black man.  Being an environmentalist meant being a socialist, a universal reformer, and a person committed to human predation wherever it was found. 

Despite the good will, honest sentiment, and passionate response to the problem, there was something a bit off about environmentalists, too much of a good thing perhaps, an irritating pouncing on everything from spotted spurge to a hot day. 'Hot enough for you?' produced torrent of bile-spewing hatred. 'Ignorant fools...social troglodytes...capitalist lackeys...insensate cowards...pigs..'. A fly on the coleslaw provoked more bitter invective - 'the spawn of the devil capitalist marauders, the first sign of an overheating planet...'. 

The same thing, if he thought to reflect on his past, was true of modern civil rights.  It wasn't enough to confront and redress the lingering remains of Jim Crow but to champion every black man who walked the earth.  Black faces were everywhere in wild disproportion to their demographic importance, black this, black that to a drumbeat deliberately loud and insistent to drown out the gunfire in the ghetto, the endemic, systemic dysfunction of the place.  And LGBTQ+ activism?  

And so it was that this bubbling irritation with social reform coincided with the worst case of poison ivy/oak that dermatologists had seen in years.  They had never seen such a perfect storm, such a deadly combination of toxins.  Usually one genus topped the other, but here was a case when Nature teamed up with a vengeance to assure that interlopers would stay away; or so it was that a physician with an ironic sense of humor said to Leverett Parsons as he wrapped him from head to toe in gauze and strapped mittens on his hands to stop him from scratching.  Unkind but true, thought Parsons as he peered out through the eyeholes in the gauze. 

Come to think of it, the mosquitoes had been bad that day too, and at least some of the blebs and bumps were due to them; and he hoped that the doctors would remove the many ticks that remained after an hour of picking them out of his hair.  

And so it was that Leverett Parsons returned to normal, got over the environmentalist thing and jettisoned the last uncomfortable baggage of doing the right thing.  He tucked into his work as an investment banker with renewed interest and made millions from canny investments in North Slope oil, Louisiana refineries, and transcontinental pipelines.