Here in Virginia, we have a hot issue ongoing:  a 42-inch pipeline to carry fracked natural gas from western Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Yorktown for export.  Oh, Dominion Power, the boss of the project, denies they're exporting it.  But of course no, heee, hah hah.  They're selling it to an exporter who will export it.  Dominion doesn't actually export it; they just sell it to a middleman.

And duplicitous people swallow the line like a large-mouth bass in the farm pond.  But I digress.  Many farmers in our county now adorn their property with anti-pipeline placards that include a line about protecting our water.  The argument is that these pipelines will explode and pollute our aquifers and that our riparian zones will be tainted during construction.

That may or may not be the case.  I don't know.  But I do find it curious that these same farmers are running around spraying herbicides all over their farms, applying chemical fertilizers (the reason for the Rhode Island-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico), overgrazing, and losing copious amounts of soil into the waterways.  Isn't that curious?

An old saying for that is "the pot calling the kettle black."  To be sure, I'm no friend of the pipeline project as currently conceived, but I do think it the height of hypocrisy for these farmers to be putting these placards all over the community while dumping thousands of gallons of chemicals.  So for me, it creates a conundrum.  Do I join them in opposition and appear to condone their hypocrisy?  Or do I just stay out of the fray and let it play out? 

To participate in the rallies without condemning the hypocrisy seems improper, and yet to sit by silently seems improper.  Oh, what is a mother to do?  You see, the other side sees and jokes about this inconsistency.  I don't mind being the butt of jokes; I just want them to have merit.

Do you have these conundrums?