Short-Term Crises Take Our Attention Away From The One Long-Term Crisis
David Brooks in today’s NY Times, talking about Obama’s presidency, encapsulates the conventional wisdom about what confronts us:
President Obama swept into office having aroused the messianic hopes of his supporters. For the past 16 months he has been on nearly permanent offense, instigating action with the stimulus bill, Afghan policy, health care reform and the nearly complete financial reform. Whether you approve or not, this has been an era of bold movement.
But now the troops are exhausted, the country is anxious, the money is spent and the Democratic majorities are teetering. The remaining pieces of legislation, on immigration and energy, are going nowhere. (The decision to do health care before energy is now looking extremely unfortunate.)
Meanwhile, the biggest problems are intractable. There’s no sign we will be successful in preventing a nuclear Iran. Especially after Monday’s events, there’s no chance of creating a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unemployment will not be coming down soon. The long-term fiscal crisis won’t be addressed soon either.
With the exception of the oblique mention of ‘energy’ and the immediate catastrophe of the Deepwater mess, Brooks — and the American public — have pulled their heads into their shells.
The biggest problem confronting us all is global climate change and the impending ecological collapse of the planet. We are so busy fighting pointless wars in Asia, posturing about Iran (which is the same scare mongering that went on when the Chinese were building their nuclear capability), and of course, the on-going reverberations of the financial collapse of recent years.
We are doing next to nothing to slow the disaster coming.
I don't see this as something new. Governments from ours to Hitler's, often trump up threats in order to maintain control of the masses. Throw all these things that resemble problems at the People and they'll not see the forest dying--they'll just see the trees flying at them.
Racism is a great example of this--trump up this idea that there is a difference of any note between dark skinned humans and light and suddenly we're missing the fact that poverty is rising in America. Play up minor differences in views and suddenly you have men in business suits wasting time and tax-payer dollars to vote on a name-change to "Freedom Fries."
Pretend that a few thousand guys in the desert are some sort of threat to our way of life and you get morons clamoring to "close the borders" and fight a "war on terror."
It's the classic "divide and conquer" strategy only, instead of our enemies using it against us, it's our governments. Boyd, the blogger behind underpaidgenius.com, wants to suggest our leaders are just oblivious toward Climate Change and are simply acting irresponsibly. I say it's worse--a cynical game played by the power-elite (both in government and out--what's the difference, really) to keep us distracted with problems that don't ultimately matter. Meanwhile, the problems that do, get only worse.
Now, Boyd suggests the biggest problem facing us is "global climate change and the impending ecological collapse of the planet." I disagree. First off, the entire planet's ecology isn't going to "collapse" it'll just stop favoring us. Second, I'm worried a much bigger problem will hit us before the planet's "human life support system" starts to fail us. That bigger problem is our economy.
Built on sand since the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, our economy is based on America's ability to create value. How can we create value in an economy like this? Our jobs have been outsourced and our dollar has lost a lot of it's value--these two facts alone suggest that there is zero hope for us to recover as a country.
And with our economy shattered, how are we going to make the changes necessary to fight the changes our climate is going to force on us whether we change our environmental ways now, or not? Answer: we won't be able to.
We've built a system that runs on money. But in order for it to work, the money needs to be worth something. If we had built a system based on mutual progress and growth, maybe things would be different. But greed was assumed to be the ultimate motivator. That's pretty much how we got here. Sadly, it's this observer's opinion that only our economy will give us the tools to get out of this ecological mess.
So, either we try to rebuild the old economy (pretty much impossible) and hope it lasts through the end of Climate Change, or we design a new economy that will allow us to deal with the coming climate changes.
I agree with Boyd that something must be done. However, I think our number one focus should be on building a new type of economy that won't be hobbled by dramatic climate change--or the greed of men in business suits.
The real catch there is, how do we do that?
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