Circling the Drain
I’ve long suspected that the only way anything in American politics is going to change, REALLY change, is when a whole lot of people start getting hungry. Not when they have to give up their 4 X 4’s, big screen TV’s, botox injections or Viagra prescriptions, but when a lot of them start missing meals. And it's starting to look like famine will get here a lot sooner than those Al Qaida guys George says are going to follow our troops home.
In the meantime, we are told to choose between Hillary (the $109 million-dollar woman) and McCain (Cheney II), because Obama doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin. He's toast. We focus our attention on Britney Spears, the Olympics and how much Oprah weighs rather than thinking about global warming, genocide in Iraq, and how using corn to make ethanol rather than food is threatening to depopulate the third world.
Two things that are happening now would indicate all the money being spent to helo us pretend we really have a choice about who rules America is really just money down the toilet: growing numbers of food riots in foreign countries and the seemingly endless rise in fuel prices. Like rising oceans or falling fish populations, these are not problems that will just fix themselves if we let the markets be. Unlike rising oceans and falling fish populations, these problems are THIS YEAR. They’re here now.
Yet Hillary’s idea to end uninsured Americans is to force them to buy it, Cheney’s defense of his orders to torture is to say “WE don’t call it torture, so it isn’t”, and both parties think there’s nothing wrong with elected officials accepting bribes, everyone is pretending there’s no limit to how much drugs or health care can cost, no limit to how much price rises the market for corn, wheat and rice will bear, and no limit to how much money can go from corporations to politicians (or the favors they receive in return).
ABC, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh say everything is fine and getting better, and America swallows it (“reality” TV DID beat the debate in ratings). So, not surprisingly, nothing will be done about more people not being able to afford to eat or drive delivery trucks or get medical care or heat next winter. But those hungry people in Haiti, Egypt and Sudan won’t be buying Dell computers or double lattes at Starbucks. And the hungry people in those other countries will become hungry people in THIS country.
And that’s when things will change: just shut off the tube and watch.
"Bitter"? Wait til you try "hungry".
Comments
If you listen closely to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, you can hear him mention over-population once. The planet has 6.7 billion people on it now with 9 billion projected for the year 2050.
The human population has been way over-extended by technology and is over-ripe for catastrophe. Individual conservation is nice and noble, but is just pissin' in the wind if the number of individuals continues to increase geometrically.
I don't expect anything to be done in regards to over-population, though. It's political suicide to even mention the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Being a cynical pessimist, I'd predict the correction will come in the form of a cataclysmic event.
Posted by: Robb Willis | April 29, 2008 11:51 AM
The one ton gorilla is the unsustainable nature of capitalism which requires infinite growth in a finite world and why they don't talk about over-population being a problem.
Posted by: Jane Doe | May 26, 2008 12:58 PM
People with power often don't think about it. People without power think about it all the time.
Posted by: Eldon Long | July 4, 2008 09:51 AM