If you have chronic health issues, you know that if you ingest, infuse, inhale, instill, or inject one medication it’ll likely lead to another and another and another, all “designed” to relieve the original symptoms — plus the “new” symptoms created by the new meds — but never cure your disease.
It’s all good for Big Health, Big Pharma and Big Insurance, but not good for the patient.
I ingest, infuse, inhale, instill, and inject more than 20 meds per day to soothe symptoms, but none of them cure my diseases. Truth is, the longer I fight the diseases, the more I realize that the only cure is to go home, go home to Earth.
Light pollution — one symptom of a deadly disease — is treated the same way by the darksky.orgs and astromagazines. Instead of doing what’s necessary to cure the disease — industrial civilization — the System allows us (read forces us) to use the meds prescribed — laws, ordinances, fixing fixtures, new technologies etc. — all meds that tinker around the edges and margins of the problem, soothe the symptoms, but never cure the disease.
We astronomers must progress (pro-GRESS, the verb) toward real progress (PRO-gress, the noun). We must strike at the core, the crux, the heart of the problem, the disease — Industrial Civilization.
We must stick a stake through its heart, stop swallowing the lies and compromise — infusing, injecting, inhaling, instilling, ingesting — the “drugs” that feed the System, neither eliminating the symptoms nor curing the disease.
How can you help? If you are an astronomer, speak up and speak out! No one ever changed the rules by following them! Stop taking all the meds prescribed by the darksky.orgs / astronomagazines! Find other ways to fight the disease, to cure the disease! Tell the Astronomical League and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to stop soothing the symptoms and get on with curing the disease of light pollution!
Think for yourself for a change. Fight the SOBs, the Satans Of Brightness, who pollute your life and the lives of others with their awful light! Share my website with others and tell them, astronomers or not, to get with the program, fight back. What do you have to lose? The Universe!
Yes, the nighttime environment is sick – really sick! And we’re the germs – critters – that are killing it. We LP activists know the cure, but our leaders in cities/counties/states won’t change their 100-years in the past, outmoded way of doing things. I refer to it as the,”Well, this is the way we’ve always done things” disease. You know these people, they just keep doing the same things over and over and calling it progess.
Everyone of them should read “The End of Night” by Paul Bogard; they would learn how to do things right! The book should be required reading in high school, college, and be read by every politician, city/county planner, and even all environmentalists. My guess is that we’d finally see real progress concerning the nighttime environment.