The three big problems we face are simple enough to list: energy, global warming, and debt. But they aren’t so simple to deal with.
America, what on earth is it going to take to wake us from this spell we seem to be under? What has to happen before we shake ourselves out of our torpor and ask ourselves: “Do we care so much about our own comfort and convenience that we’re willing to bequeath to our children and grandchildren a country greatly diminished, a world in peril, and, yes, a civilization at risk?”
That all sounds very dramatic and extreme, and there are many who would dismiss this whole topic with a wave of their hand and a suggestion that maybe it’s time to lighten up; after all, the world has survived countless big catastrophies over the centuries, and things always got better in the end.
The sad and scary and frustrating fact is that there’s no way to convince these people that we need to act. They don’t want to open their minds to anything that they don’t already believe. And to make matters worse, most of them—and us—will be dead before some of the calamitous events play out, so we won’t even get the pathetic satisfaction of being able to say to them, “We told you so.”
An impartial jury would take about 12 seconds to find America guilty of all charges when it comes to energy. We use a huge, vastly disproportionate share of the world’s oil. The proposed federal budget aside, we don’t want to build nuclear power plants and we have no sense of urgency in developing alternative fuels. We refuse to demand substantially increased mileage performance from our car manufacturers. And we won’t seriously discuss raising gasoline taxes by two dollars a gallon—a move that would, in one fell swoop, reduce gas consumption, create a demand for fuel-efficient cars, and raise a lot of money that could be used to reduce our national debt. Our politicians won’t do anything, and the public just continues to let them get away with it.
When it comes to global warming, there are some who say it’s just part of Nature’s plan, that the world has always gone through cycles of warmer and colder weather, that it’s nothing to worry about and nothing we can prevent. Others say it’s a figment of extremists’ imaginations. And still others say we can’t prove anything, which is like catching your kid standing over a spilled pitcher of Kool-Aid and having him say, “You can’t actually prove I did it.” Come on, folks, get real: auto emissions, fossil-fuel burning, zero energy limitations, and virtually total lack of concern add up to a coming crisis of disastrous proportions. When your grandchildren and great-grandchildren have to face the problem, chances are pretty good they’ll say, “Grandma and Grandpa knew it was happening. Why, why, why didn’t they do anything about it?”
The question of debt staggers and mystifies me. Our national debt is beyond our ability to visualize, and it’s growing every day. No one seems to care that foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities total close to $2.2 trillion, and that a huge chunk of that is owned by China. This is not a pleasant position to be in, but where are the politicians clamoring to address it? And where are American citizens’ voices screaming out to Washington to—for the sake of our future—get this debt under control? Instead, what we hear are quotes from some obscure economist declaring that our debt is nothing to worry about and is in appropriate proportion to historical something-or-other standards. Some comfort.
America has huge problems. For lots of reasons, not enough of our leaders and not enough of our citizens seem to want to tackle those problems, certainly not in a meaningful way. And because the day of reckoning is somewhere in the relatively distant future—at least sometime after the next election—nothing gets done.
(Note to our generation: Dear Grandma and Grandpa, we thought you loved us.)
