When I was a kid, on special occasions my family would go to a restaurant to celebrate. Usually these were local and familiar places, but as time went on and people would make recommendations, the list of places grew.

One time our next door neighbor, Ruth, recommended we try a new place she had been to.  This not only meant a new place, but it called for getting more dressed up than we usually did, and driving some distance to get to as well.

The Old Mill was exactly what its name implied. It sat on a mill pond formed by a dam, and the water passing through the sluice gate of the dam still kept the huge water wheel turning. The mill pond and the mill were on the Nashua River, and that meant we went to Fitchburg for the first time.

Fitchburg had a lot of paper mills on the Nashua River, and they routinely dumped their waste into it.  Because of the chemicals used in the paper production process, the river was impressively colored with the vibrant colors you saw in boxes of crayons, and they swirled around each other like some modern painting staying separate, perhaps because of the chemicals that created them and their various viscosities.

In some places the river looked like a modern painting.

This was fascinating to a kid who had only seen lakes, rivers, and ponds that were the color of, well, water.

I was too young to know the danger of pollution, so I guess I was fooled into thinking colorful rivers were good things.

Eventually the river got cleaned up as anti-pollution laws were passed, but even though the surface looked all right, over the years chemicals had sunk to the bottom, and before the river could be considered reclaimed and clean, what had settled on the bottom had to be removed.

That was a long process.

In my home town everyone would go to Bolivar Pond to the town beach. This pond had also been created by a dam built downstream from some factories. It was a little on the brownish side. The older kids would swim out to the middle and were tall enough to stand on what used to be a raised road before the dam had been built.

We younger kids thought it was great when coming out of the water the peach fuzz on our bodies was noticeable because of the brown stuff that was occasionally in the water that clung to it, and as men had hairy bodies, we could pretend we were men.

When it was eventually determined that that brown stuff was pollution and the pond was just too full of bacteria, it was closed and a town pool was built nearby.

These two scenarios, determining the water people were using was extremely unhealthy and the subsequent clean up, were repeated all over the country where pollution laws stopped factories from dumping their waste into rivers and streams, and clean water was eventually restored in many places.  Some places, like Bolivar Pond, are still closed to use, but they are a bit cleaner now.

Link popularity can be enhanced through brand viagra 100mg devensec.com exchange of links. Once there is levitra prescription this page proper reaching of signals to the penile organ. That being said, there are certain order cheap levitra risks when purchasing online as well. Most conductive impairments can be devensec.com mastercard cialis online treated medically and improved upon. When I was older and moved around, I saw other clean lakes and rivers that locals would tell me had been so polluted they were avoided, and when in Ohio I was told that at one time you could light the Cuyahoga River with a match.

So in my humble opinion, clean water acts and the regulations that keep rivers clean are good things.

But…..

The Republicans just passed a measure to repeal the Stream Protection Rule.

In other words, corporations can begin to once again dump waste in our rivers and streams, without consequence. They can avoid the cost of disposing of their waste in proper and safe ways, and to hell with those downstream.

They can once again fill rivers, ponds, streams, and lakes with toxic sludge.

The motivation to allow this could be as simple as spite or hate, since the Stream Protection Rule was one of President Obama’s signature environmental accomplishments.

The other reason could simply be that the GOP favors its friends and donors over the people they are supposed to represent and protect.

West Virginia Republican Shelley Capito would have you believe that this move is because,

“The Stream Protection Rule is the latest in a series of overreaching and misguided Obama-era regulations that have targeted America’s coal industry. If this rule were allowed to stay in place, it would add to the economic devastation for people in coal communities.”

But is it a good trade off, even if this were true, that to help save a dying industry, instead of retraining coal miners for work in those industries that can supply power without coal, we will all be subjected to polluted water even though we live nowhere near those coal communities?

How will dumping factory waste into New Hampshire’s rivers help the coal miners in West Virginia?

The GOP seems intent on acting out their hatred of Obama, even if it kills us.

And then they take away healthcare to boot.