The following letter of mine was published in the Calgary Herald (Sept. 1). It was in response to a recent series of grizzly bear attacks on hikers in the mountains near where I live (in places where my family and I normally hike!).
If the government deliberately placed other people’s safety at risk by, say, knowingly installing unsafe public facilities or allowing E. coli bacteria to thrive in public drinking water, those responsible would suffer public outrage and legal prosecution.
But if the government actively promotes expansion of the grizzly bear population in public parks, and people consequently get injured or killed, the government gets away with it.
It seems that the government has inverted its purpose.
Instead of protecting the rights of individuals to life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness, it now actively sacrifices these rights to the anti-human goal of returning the mountain parks to a pre-human state.
The government has become an agent of nature-worshiping environmentalists who value pristine nature above human life.
Consequently, those of us who value our lives, our family and our mountain recreation are now forced to pay government (via taxation) to harm us.
If the government now has the power to sacrifice humans to bears, then there is nothing in principle to stop government from eventually sacrificing humans to who knows what — perhaps the “threatened” E. coli bacteria.
P.S. If you want to see pure hatred of human life you can look at the letter below that appeared on the same page: http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/stories/000901/4074450.html
