i watch in amazement as post after post in this forum sings the praises of one candidate or another. Did you hear Obama's plan for x? Did you see Hillary's poll numbers in South Carolina? it must be a very nice thing to be a true believer.
for many here, the mantra is all about the evils bush has brought. well, no argument there. he has virtually dismantled all that was good about our government. clearly, and I never thought anyone could top Nixon, bush is and will always remain the worst person ever to occupy the White House. but bush is "transitory". to those who think the real enemy is just bush, you're missing the bigger picture. you've allowed your legitimate disdain for him to shield you from the longer term crises we face.
and some hear arguments like this post's theme and start the drumbeat about "why do you post here" or "are you saying there's no difference between the parties" or "yeah, look at all the great things Nader brought us" ... the answer? no, that's not the point at all ...
some of us, somehow we've been labeled "the left", believe that our systems and institutions are collapsing. we believe our lifestyles can no longer be sustained. we believe our ability to procure the oil we need will soon start to fail. we believe, on a massive scale especially in the west, that water will not be available to major cities. we believe that global warming will be the final nail in all our coffins.
radical changes ARE GOING TO OCCUR in this country and they are going to occur very soon. it might be 2 years or 5 or 10 but have no doubt, they are going to occur. a rational and conservative approach to this onslaught of horrors would be to start aggressively addressing it now. we've seen elements of that in Al Gore's crusade. I commend him for what he's done. But the little changes, the incrementalism, being discussed in our electoral campaigns is woefully inadequate. the sad part is, we the people and our electoral system might well shun a candidate who even mentions the darkness we face. if our campaigns fear they are not free to lead, we find ourselves in a situation where there is no leadership. i'm afraid that is the state of the national dialog.
to take just one of many examples, what candidate will stand up and call for gas rationing? i posted a thread about that on DU and those who think themselves "liberals" were up in arms about it. how dare you impose your authoritarian restrictions on us!!!! they aren't liberals; they're libertarians.
guess what? we are seeing gas rationing happening right now. it is capitalist gas rationing. if you can't afford it, don't buy it. is that a "liberal" way to apportion gasoline to citizens? i don't think so. in the absence of quality mass transit, gasoline for many is a necessity. what do these so called liberals say to the poor? tough!!!! they have no answer. what does Obama say about gas rationing? Hillary? any of them? the point is that absent a system that fairly allocates gasoline, the rationing system is based only on PRICE. thanks very much, liberals. thanks for supporting the capitalist status quo.
the main point is that our process of electing people is badly crippled. the current system demands so much money that those who have money, the ultimate supporters of the status quo, must be catered to. any visionary trying to run would be immediately ostracized. think of it this way: if you are the candidate talking about the need for radical change, most voters don't yet see the need for that change. it would be easy to paint you as a "far lefty" or a crackpot or an extremist. does that make the vision you have wrong? of course not. it just makes you unelectable. the problem is, the rest of the candidates are all going on about how the world is flat. they're just plain wrong. but then everyone knows the world is flat. we've always known it. and so, the flat worlders and their cheerleaders live happily ever after. until they don't.
the radical changes are just around the corner. the sooner we see them and prepare for them, the less rough things will be. in the meantime, those waving their little candidate flags may not be helping the situation at all. we need to demand real answers from those seeking to lead. we cannot allow the current "status quo incrementalism" to continue. it's up to us. we only get the leadership we demand.
i hope you take the time to read this whole article ... here's an excerpt:
source:
http://kunstler.com/mags_diary21.html If nothing else, the amount of money that the candidates need to raise -- and burn through in airplane charters, staff salaries, and staged events -- puts them all in jeopardy of corrupting themselves to the various donors desperate to preserve their prerogatives under the status quo.
What everybody seems to sense semi-consciously is that the status quo is dragging the US into an abyss. But so far, no one among the declared candidates has been able or willing to express a coherent view of what it is in the status quo, exactly, that is doing the dragging. One undeclared figure, Al Gore, has presented the climate change part of the story and pretty much stopped there -- perhaps sensing that if he ventured to offer views on anything else, he'd start sounding like an actual candidate. But my guess is that the really important issues will never be articulated in the course of this campaign because they are too painful for the public to hear. And so all the premature debating and posturing will amount to a smokescreen of words meant to conceal the fact that we are a nation without confidence that any leadership can guide us into a plausible future.<skip>
Here are the some of truths that we seem unable to face:
Very soon we won't have the fossil fuel energy supplies to run the USA as it is currently set up, and no combination of wished-for alternative energy schemes based on so-called "renewables" will allow us to keep running it, either. Meaning, that we'd better start making other arrangements immediately for how we occupy the landscape, how we grow our food, how we move people and things from place to place, and how we reconstruct an economy consistent with these new arrangements.
The longer we put off making these new arrangements, the harder we're going to slam into a wall of reality, and when it occurs a lot of things will shake loose in this country. It will become self-evident that the things we've invested all our wealth in will not retain value -- especially suburban real estate and all the activities related to car dependency, from the interstate highway system to national chain retail. It will also become obvious that we can't base our economy on building more of this stuff.
Our current military adventures in the Middle East, are predicated largely on keeping the old arrangements going. We're in Iraq because we built Dallas, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Long Island the way we did, and the only way we can hope to keep these organisms going even a little while longer is to keep open our oil supply line to the Persian Gulf. The truth is, these organisms will not survive the oil-scarcer future in the form they're in. The American people need to come to grips with this. No amount of chest-thumping around the globe will change it. In any case, sooner or later we'll exhaust our military and bankrupt ourselves trying to project our influence into these places overseas -- meaning, sooner or later we will withdraw back into our own hemisphere. I wonder if Wolf Blitzer of CNN will ask any of the candidates, what happens then? <skip>
Do any of the candidates for president recognize how this works, or have any idea how much disorder this phase change will send thundering through our sociopolitical infrastructure?
With the election campaign revving up so prematurely, it is very possible that all the candidates now in the arena will exhaust, bankrupt, and even disgrace their campaigns as they desperately pirouette around these painful truths, and that none of them will survive the process with their political legitimacy intact. In the meantime, unsettling events on the outside will intrude on the protective bubble in which the public has taken shelter -- more bloody disturbances around the Middle East, dangerous shenanigans in the financial markets, untoward weather events in vulnerable places. <skip>
The premature election campaign, with all its reassuring televised ceremonies of pre-cooked debate and formal posturing, may end up having the opposite of its intended effect. It may expose the more frightening reality that our political system is not up to the challenges before us. And then what will we do?
