energy drain

another sell-out crowd in Washington.
sell-out of the American people, that is.

the newly-passed and flagrantly misnamed "energy bill" (unless taken to mean its cost to the taxpayers tapped to fund the megalithic corporate giants who will benefit from it) is 1,725 pages of business as usual for the overpaid, out-of-touch, sycophantic Beltway insiders (outnumbered by oil-lubricated lobbyists by an astonishing margin).

any fools out here in the real world (unless taken to mean the rest of the globe beyond the U S of A, which is realer by an astonishing margin) who had the unmitigated audacity to believe that their supposedly elected government would offer the leadership needed to raise us from the quagmire of fossil fuel dependency and its consequent foreign relations ignominy were, well, foolish.

I admit, I was one.

folks, this transition (from senseless and destructive to sensible and benign energy generation and usage) is not going to be easy. we've come to accept that our technology will save us from whatever messy entanglements we stumble into. perhaps it could, but how can it if a) the technology is controlled by vast powers with vested interests contrary to our enlightened interests and b) the people themselves do not urgently insist upon the transition?

it's not up to washington anymore. just how much more proof of the dismantle-for-cash agenda of the present administration do you need than the past five years of hideous government-for-and-by-the-rich? the wolves aren't at the door, they're in living room gnawing on the bones of our children! and we're standing idly by, pretending not to see their blood-stained muzzles, calling them cute doggies.....

pull the veil of complacency from your own eyes and take a long hard look at what's happening in our world. we're waging a war for oil. it can't be for "security" or "democracy" since, after two years, both are, if anything, farther from reality in iraq than they were before the war, saddam hussein's deposing notwithstanding. that war is bleeding lives in exchange for barrels of crude. we're heedlessly consuming resources at a time when there has been no better dissemination of information about the steep environmental and human costs of our rapacious habits. we're keeping our heads in the sand in order to perpetuate a clearly unsupportable lifestyle. how long do you expect this can go on?

my prescription for america is a good dose of personal accountability. 'bout time we had a good, hard look at our disturbingly disconnected sense of the world. what are the effects of your actions? you drop a stone in a still pond and ripples expand outward. so too when you take the least action in your life--- from turning on a lightswitch to buying a bag of groceries--- the effects of that action ripple outward and touch the world in which you live. I'm saying let's bring that knowledge of consequence to consciousness by learning the specific and minute ways in which our lives and the life of this planet are interconnected. it's time to discard the gluttonous consumerist model of the american lifestyle and to replace it with something workable, sustainable, rational. america still harbors a few clever, thoughtful, innovative people; let's encourage them to come forward and lead the ignorant masses away from their reality tv shows and toward a survivable future guided by principles like sustainability, community, responsibility, ecology.

idealist that I am, I think it's still possible to do so.