OK. As we look at the alarming crisis that BP and the oil industry has brought us to, as we evaluate the amount of military spending we are pouring into the middle east for no evident return (and as we consistently apologize for killing innocent civilians with airborne missiles), as we observe politicians and lobbyists letting payoffs and focused fundraising deny the needs of voters in favor of the needs of corporations, as we see the Supreme Court gradually eliminate generations of civil rights achievements, we are getting more and more convinced that making a change in America… indeed in the whole world… is getting less and less possible.
Bummer.
Our air is polluted, as are our seas and lakes. Species we would like to preserve are becoming extinct, while species of new (to our shores) and dangerous insects are coming out in the changed environment to sting us with new diseases appearing in their wake. The climate… oh, the climate… it is getting warmer and, in some areas drier, and less beneficial to our agriculture. Our food sources might just disappear by the end of the century.
Yet it would seem that the public is more concerned with the price of SUV’s (which, of course, 95% of which are not used as off-road vehicles or for any sports/utility purpose whatever, and which pollute and use more fossil fuel than smaller, more efficient vehicles) than they are with the price that food, water and air will cost us in the very near future. Much of this is due to the prominence of advertising as the functioning basis of ALL of our media (and if you think public broadcasting avoids this, just start keeping track of all the donor companies that get noted with hardly subtle ads at the beginnings and end of programs … and guess how much influence these companies have on what is broadcast or reported.)
We listen to liars on television these days… like the corporate officer of BP telling us that this kind of crisis has never happened before less than a week after 60 Minutes publicly demonstrated that these crises happen all the time. We don’t want accountability debated… we need something done… something changed in how government and business work for people as opposed to profits.
So we will go our way into more organic gardening, and less automobile travel, and more working in our own local community, and less falling into trusting silence as those who are “leading” us become millionaires as we become the new poor.
If nothing changes, we most likely have ourselves to blame.