Think of this as Volume 11, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I’ve written since 1997. Enjoy.
Waste.
At the heart of our current crisis is one word, waste.
We have been wasting the energy of the world, and wasting our own energy. We have wasted too much time on nothing but our own comfort. We have piled mountains of waste around our big cities, dumped mountains more into our seas and rivers, and given no thought to getting more from it. We have wasted our power in the world, and even our ideals have been wasted away, tossed aside as mere words when deeds are all that matter.
These are hard words to hear. They are not natural applause lines. So we’re not given them. Instead we’re given a vague mantra of change and hope which becomes easy to ridicule if it’s repeated often enough. Which allows the media to define this race as no different from a half-dozen others over the last few decades, all about personality, tactics and money.
That distraction will kill our nation, if we let it, as we have let it for a generation now.
Because we have not been given the truth the 2008 campaign has devolved into ennui. Our nation is like a man drowning in quicksand who has accepted his own doom and is thus reluctant to grab the rope which might save him. He’s filled with excuses, that the rope won’t hold, that he might pull in others. He remembers the advice that if you don’t fight you’ll float, yet his heart is racing.
Thus we as a nation face the risk, and the opportunity, which all great crises engender.
We are where our forefathers were, 76 years ago, fearing fear itself.
We are where their forefathers were, 72 years before that, unaware of the better angels of our nature.
And again, four score and four more back, at the dawn of our nation, facing a King’s wrath and our own worst fears.
Will we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor again? And if so, to what?
To dealing with waste, and in so doing erase all limits to what our children can accomplish.
This is our crisis, not just the crisis we face but the crisis which the world faces. The world turns to the United States of America for leadership in this crisis, and that is our task. To lead.
To do this we must transform our incentives. We must become a nation of makers again, and in so doing re-make the world.
This will not be easy. There will be pain. There will be struggle. Those who have benefited most from this era of waste will howl the loudest. Those who see wealth as what you can pull from the Earth will try to hang the living ghost of Jimmy Carter around our necks.
Let them. It’s time to resurrect it.
Jimmy Carter was the greatest President of your lifetime, and mine. He was so far ahead of his time we could not, as a nation, even conceive of what he was saying, and so ran from him as fast as possible, called him a failure, a joke.
Yet where was he wrong? He defined the present Crisis as no President has before or since. He gave America its last great crusade in two words — Human Rights. Isn’t this what we’re really all about, beneath the flags and the fireworks? And isn’t this what we’ve done the most to reject in our time?
Those ideas must be resurrected, and made manifest. They must be turned into deeds. We must extract enough energy from the Sun and the wind and the heat of the Earth so we can save it as hydrogen, then sequester that energy’s waste so that water flows in direct proportion to human life and human activity.
Meanwhile, we must learn the way of efficiency. That doesn’t mean making do with less. It means producing more from every drop of fuel we must consume. This is how we become competitive again. Energy efficiency can trump low wages. High energy prices are an opportunity for American business to regain its leadership, through technology that creates more efficient production, and which does a better job re-using all the inputs which go into the products we use.
Human rights is the flag we must fly again in the world. That starts with identifying, rejecting, and censuring the crimes of our own time. But it only starts there. It also means living up to those ideals in our dealings with the rest of the world, and then using all our power to bring other nations onto that path with us, at the end of which lies true prosperity, one all mankind can share in through the hard work of education, teaching, and building.
What has been given to us by our press and our leaders as a Great Crisis is in fact a Great Opportunity. It is a chance for us to re-make our nation, and in so doing to re-make the Earth, in a more sustainable image, one where war and oppression are seen for what they are, waste, the real enemy.
When waste is seen, not as something to turn away from, but something to turn toward, the true enemy we must fight, only then will we gain the Common Sense to deal with The Crisis of our time.
