WASTING TIME?

A lot of smart people like President Obama. I do too. But I differ with them when they imply that we can afford to sit back and let the White House figure out how to solve the nation’s and the world’s problems by themselves.

Instead, I spend an inordinate of time commenting to blog posts. A haunting feeling that I’m wasting my time, which could be better spent doing concrete immediate tasks, is not enough to deter me. I suspect that I’m addicted to blogging. Recently, I’ve been commenting on what the White House and we the people must do together to make a better world.

The most recent issue of my discussions has been the decline of America.

If I may be permitted an intuitive take on this, I'd say that America has been on a trajectory of decline in influence and confidence since the Vietnam war, with a great worsening of that trend since Reagan. While most liberals view the Clinton presidency as a good time in America, I don’t. To me, he merely expanded the corporatist trend Reagan started, and expanded it to the rest of the world.

The breakdown of the Iron Curtain only seemed to make things worse, since it strengthened the role of corporatism and expanded it to the former USSR as well. At the same time, the correlated aspect of abuse and destruction of Earth's environmental capital mushroomed. That FELT bad. So-called freedom was only freedom to exploit poor countries and the environment, while spreading a tyrannical system of unsustainable development on an ever wider scale (read, China, the Amazon, India, etc.).

Earth's environmental capital is said to be in excess of a trillion dollars, did we have to pay for it instead of get it for free. The people who are conserving this capital best are Earth's aborigines and other self-sufficient third world peoples (who don't use or over use fossil fuels or need IMF loans). While we can't and need not return to the aboriginal state ourselves, we can learn from these societies and renew our charter to foster their kind of self-sufficiency (obviating the need to fight wars over oil, or be everywhere at all times). What I'm talking about is radical change. Will we rise to the occasion? I certainly don't know. My job is to tell it like I see it, and let the chips fall where they may.