Have you ever heard of Agenda 21?

I normally don’t start a column with a question but if you have never heard of Agenda 21 and believe in the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, which guarantees us certain unalienable rights, you better be scared as to what Agenda 21 really is.

What I find amazing is that it has been around since 1992 having originated in the United Nations. President Obama signed his 86th executive order on June 9, 2011, which established the White House Rural Council which parallels the United Nations Agenda 21. Rural America, keep sleeping and kiss your rights goodbye.

Agenda 21 is also known as the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, which counts more than 150 nations along with the United States as participants. The United Nations adopted a policy that “All countries should establish as a matter of urgency a national policy on human settlements, embodying the distribution of population over their national territory. Such a policy should be devised to facilitate population redistribution to accord with the availability of resources.”

There are 40 chapters in Agenda 21, which are divided into four sections. Section I is titled Social and Economic Dimensions, which includes altering consumption patterns, improving health and combating poverty. Section II is titled Conservation and Management of Resources for Development, which is about protecting our environment, combating deforestation and controlling pollution. Section III is titled Strengthening the Role of Major Groups, which includes women, children, local authorities and workers. Section IV is titled Means of Implementation, which as far as I can determine really stomps on our constitutional rights.

Agenda 21 will change the way we eat, learn and live in order to save Planet Earth or at least that’s what it claims is necessary. To put it as simple as I can, Agenda 21 will dictate our entire daily life, not only in the United States but around our world as well. The only way I see that happening is a total redistribution of wealth, which means our money will go to third world nations on other continents. What’s even scarier is that Congress has not voted or even debated on Agenda 21 and yet President Obama is pushing ahead with it with a presidential executive order. There would be a government council that controls transportation, food/water resources, monitor how all land would be used and where we would live. Oops, that’s already happened.

When it comes to government regulating transportation, under Agenda 21 American farmers could be hit the hardest. I had never heard of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration but it is a branch of government under the federal Department of Transportation. The FMCSA wants laws that force farmers and farm employees to have a commercial driver’s license in order to operate any and all farmer equipment. That means that they want to reclassify farm equipment as commercial motor vehicles. Why do I have the feeling small farms will become obsolete because they can’t afford to stay in business. I will mention a program called Smart Growth that affects the cost of cars, roads, parking, toll roads, federal subsidies to states for transportation and even air travel with a goal of forcing us to use light and high-speed rail.

What I and others fear is that Agenda 21 will ultimately dictate where we live, how we travel, what we eat and more importantly, what we have for an income. Globalization has had an extremely adverse impact on America and yet the vast majority of us never saw it coming. Coming from an area of New Hampshire with several rivers, I grew up in a period of time where employment, or should I say unemployment, was not a problem. Once I turned 14 I had no problem finding a job (perhaps helped even more having a father that ensured I had that thought to begin with). As we all know now, jobs have fled the United States faster than a cockroach fleeing Raid spray. Shouldn’t we begin to wonder why that happened in the first place because to me that sounds like someone in government began implementing Agenda 21 before we even knew about it.

What’s even more amazing is that Al Gore wrote a book in 1992 which was when Agenda 21 was being implemented and the title of that book? Oh yeah, Earth in the Balance. Several years later he introduced a movie, An Inconvenient Truth. I sure am glad that he planted lots of trees as he rode in his jet polluting the stratosphere promoting that movie. But then, what do I know? I used the Internet before he invented it and I don’t want to live in a little pink house.

Lane Hiltunen, of Windham, is going to follow the lead of Congress and borrow more money in order to spend less.