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Beginning some thirty years ago, Carl Sagan, J. E. Lovelock and other scientists began warning that burning fossil fuels would result in a greenhouse effect. Yet the same faith-based “conservatives” who ignored the need to conserve, applauded as Ronald Reagan stripped solar panels from the White House and clean energy incentives from the national budget. Now hear the pathetic chants from their benighted tribe:
“Drill here! Drill now!”
And so such chants resound. Death to terrorists. Build more bombs. More ships. More planes. Support the Troops! They’ll keep us safe.
In the next fiscal year we’ll throw nearly a trillion dollars at the military, counting supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s more than the rest of the world combined will spend on all things military. Some among those nations have signaled they’ll raise their spending in response, prompting a cry for still more from us. And so the military feedback loop spirals onward, mesmerizing the faithful.
Few pause amid the clamor to consider truths that might set us free.
Here’s one: For the cost of one cruise missile or one aerial drone, we could build 80 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, whence terror springs. Yet we feed the god of cruise missiles while starving the benign spirit of education.
Here’s another: Osama bin Laden told the world why he launched a jihad that most people agree included the terror of 9/11. It was because the feet of infidels trod sacred ground. Osama mostly won. We withdrew from Saudi Arabia as he and the house of Saud demanded. We linger in Iraq, oblivious that our presence recruits more terrorists for the likes of bin Laden.
Here’s one more: Clean energy cannot compete against Big Oil and Big Coal unless nurtured, yet the President and Congress spent the last eight years giving tax breaks to gas companies, while mostly ignoring wind, solar, geothermal and other sources.
On Easter Island, the stones stand looking, silent as voices of the faithful who built them so many years ago.
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