Energy work
Jun. 27th, 2010 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nolawitch58After three or four decades of dragging our collective feet towards energy efficiency and weaing ourselves off oil, we have come to a tipping point caused by an environmental disaster. Are we going to be serious this time and require more robust fuel efficiency standards? Are we going to insist on mass transportation that will get millions of people out of their cars and into buses and trains? Can we open the eyes of the American people to see that all their plastic packaging and crap take a heavy toll on the planet?
A quarter of the American people are hardcore in their obstinate idiocy. They still believe against all fact and reason that Iraq had WMDs and that George W. Bush was a good president. They believe that tax cuts for the wealthy somehow benefit them despite all evidence to the contrary. Write them off. They are the Neanderthals in our midst. Those of us who desperately crave progress and repudiation of conservative ideology are few. The rest fall within a range of ignorance or apathy. If they are engaged, depending on their mood, they may see benefits even though they would have to make small sacrifices. Is this generation up to sacrifice of any kind?
Honestly, I don't expect my generation, the Boomers, to sacrifice. We just don't as a group. We've been so habituated to getting everything we want when we want it. We're spoiled like no other generation has ever been spoiled. The sad part is that our standard of living is not better than our parents' was. Our wages have not kept pace with inflation due to decades of conservative policies that favored the wealthy over the middle class. Yet we still expect the sun, moon and stars to be at our beck and call. Generation X is more realistic, but also more cynical due to growing up during those decades of lost opportunities. The Millennials are similarly a cypher. Not only are their opportunities slim, but jobs they could have had have been outsourced to foreign countries and their educational standards were diminished per conservative hatreds of "book learning" over Bible thumping.
The government has finally become the ogre the conservatives claimed it was, by their hand and intention. By appointing their cronies, they have ensured that the agencies created to oversee and regulate industries are useless to do either. Almost every high office in the land is beholden to some moneyed interest that is counter to the average American's interest. Irrational fear is pervasive. The lion's share of our tax dollars goes to the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
How then can we direct our energy toward climbing out of the rut back into the light of hope?
A quarter of the American people are hardcore in their obstinate idiocy. They still believe against all fact and reason that Iraq had WMDs and that George W. Bush was a good president. They believe that tax cuts for the wealthy somehow benefit them despite all evidence to the contrary. Write them off. They are the Neanderthals in our midst. Those of us who desperately crave progress and repudiation of conservative ideology are few. The rest fall within a range of ignorance or apathy. If they are engaged, depending on their mood, they may see benefits even though they would have to make small sacrifices. Is this generation up to sacrifice of any kind?
Honestly, I don't expect my generation, the Boomers, to sacrifice. We just don't as a group. We've been so habituated to getting everything we want when we want it. We're spoiled like no other generation has ever been spoiled. The sad part is that our standard of living is not better than our parents' was. Our wages have not kept pace with inflation due to decades of conservative policies that favored the wealthy over the middle class. Yet we still expect the sun, moon and stars to be at our beck and call. Generation X is more realistic, but also more cynical due to growing up during those decades of lost opportunities. The Millennials are similarly a cypher. Not only are their opportunities slim, but jobs they could have had have been outsourced to foreign countries and their educational standards were diminished per conservative hatreds of "book learning" over Bible thumping.
The government has finally become the ogre the conservatives claimed it was, by their hand and intention. By appointing their cronies, they have ensured that the agencies created to oversee and regulate industries are useless to do either. Almost every high office in the land is beholden to some moneyed interest that is counter to the average American's interest. Irrational fear is pervasive. The lion's share of our tax dollars goes to the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
How then can we direct our energy toward climbing out of the rut back into the light of hope?
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-28 07:04 am (UTC)But no, no answers here...