A violent fantasy about penguins

Here’s some hate mail I received. To enhance the entertainment factor, I will not provide any context to set this up:

Dear Mr. Walsh,

Penguins are remarkable creatures… They love, play, and interact just like humans.

Your comments today were probably the most hideous things I’ve ever heard. I never thought I’d turn on the radio to hear violent fantasies about penguins. Do you think it’s anymore appropriate to wish a genocide on penguins than it is to wish a genocide on any other ethnic group?… I’m sorry if their existence gets in the way of your precious “oil”. Maybe your existence gets in their way. But I suppose you’ve never thought of that.

I’ll be contacting your employer and several animal rights groups about your offensive and abusive remarks.

-Carol

Alright. So add penguins to the list of groups I’ve offended. You know you’re doing something right when you get hate mail that starts with the sentence: “Penguins are remarkable creatures”.

I can’t be sure, as I’ve often slandered penguins on the air, but I think this particular email was prompted by a conversation we had today regarding the need for our country to fully exploit its natural resources. In an attempt to dramatically illustrate the insanity of leaving vast amounts of oil and gas unused, while Americans die overseas due to conflicts largely related to our dependence on foreign oil, I stated that I would “drill through a penguin’s heart to access our oil”.

To be clear, I neither support nor condone wanton penguin murder. I also can not conceive of a situation where one would need to, in fact, drill through a penguin. But I felt it necessary to communicate the utter lunacy of continuing to watch HUMANS die just so we can appease the environmental lobby and sell our souls to the Saudis instead of simply taking advantage of our own resources. This political decision has consequences. Deadly consequences.

If I could, I would displace caribou and penguins in a second in order to save and improve human life. I don’t even understand why we’re arguing about this. God left billions of dollars under the earth and we respond by bickering about whether or not we should extract it. It’s beyond ridiculous. And for every sad, tragic picture of an oil soaked seagull after a spill, I can show you 1000 pictures of dead Americans who would be alive today if we ended our oil based alliances overseas. And then I could show you another 1000 photos of communities that have been brought back to life because some company came in and gave everyone a fat stack of cash for permission to drill for the gas under their property. It just so happens that my sister lives in such a community. Talk to her before you tell me about the horrors of fracking, Matt Damon.

But what’s the point of trying to communicate the fact that the extremist environmental lobby continues to push policies that lead directly to death, war and recession? I mean, we’re dealing with people who refer to penguins as an “ethnic group”.

There’s no reasoning with that level of mania.