Homo sapien has started a runaway process that signals extinction. Who is surprised that plastic is toxic. I am humiliated when I tell people that Appalachian opiate addiction is a side effect of unmitigated corporate greed versus the extent to which morality can be used as a yardstick of a person’s worth. When I tell my friends that their annual cutting down of old oak forests, the ones that took centuries to grow, just so Americans can have paper towels, is not the quick picker-upper, but a reality that contributes to every summer’s rolling pink fog that inundates our stinking air as it slides salubriously from the Ohio Valley’s power plants into our mountains, our hollows, and our lungs. The industrial fog in my backyard is not a romance with nature. The mountains are my home. If I articulate the word – doom – I get an angry response. I am informed how my friends and family are going to escape Appalachia, and have I heard the rumor that coal mining is coming back. There will be jobs.

My eyes to the sky.

There will be no jobs. There are no jobs. There has never been real jobs. Our schools still practice the antiquated Tanner test where we require boys to stand at attention naked while the size of their penises, the size of the breasts, genitals, testicular volume and development of pubic hair is probed and abnormality is measured by teachers. Having more and more children to face this is, indeed, immoral. We will all be humiliated. Benjamin Braddock: Plastics. Plastics.