The Greatest Main Missed Chance on Earth
by Stuart Heady
If Democrats fail to grasp the historic opportunity at hand, and miss perhaps the greatest main chance of the era, future history should record that we were tragically shortsighted and thus let the whole of humanity down when it could have been our finest moment.
All these Harvard and Yale educated people, all these children of John F Kennedy. What was his legacy if not the courage to think on an historic scale?
We don't just need alternative policies that get us back to a status quo, we need to address a paradigm shift on a scale that may be unprecedented in politics since the American Revolution.
There is a "Perfect Storm" of issues piling up, but being kept from the center of attention, even though the imperative nature of them should be a 24/7 concern that eclipses all others.
The media can be blamed for this, controlled as they are by poweful interests behind the scenes. But leading Democrats are at fault for lacking the courage to really be leaders at a time when courageous leadership is truly required, not merely rhetorical "framing."
Economic justice in a global economy could create a middle class in countries currently suffering from dire poverty, instead of a massive emigration as people seek to relocate in Europe or the United States.
Global Warming will affect poorer countries the most, and this will create a level of tragedy and sorrow that will affect the US and Europe as well, let along whatever else may happen as a result of ignoring this concern.
The fact that Oil, a resource millions of years in the making, is about half gone after a little over a hundred years may have a devastating impact on the US economy and that of the world if not addressed the way this condition should have been 25 years ago.
Resource depletion versus population growth and the growing desire for a middle class lifestyle in the world, could mean the need for three or four planet Earths if resource consumption at the present pace does not abate. Yet all economic planning is based on the assumption that consumer growth has no limits. The stress that is already being caused by this needs to be front and center.
The Bush administration came to power because people felt that Bush, with oil industry interests behind him, might have a sense of this situation.
Indeed, one can say that they did: A nineteenth Century one, based on using the US Military to keep the worldwide paradigm under control, to keep the 1950s from ever ending.
The argument over Iraq, especially whether to pull out or not, ought to provide an opportunity to insert the big picture into the limelight.
Kerry left the big ammunition alone when he failed to do that. Bush is obviously someone who is advantaged when the basis for all the debates offers a contest over how best to mince words.
If Kerry had pointed out that, as someone intimately connected to the Heinz Ketchup story, he was aware of how the consumer economy of the 1950s was created, and that all the nostalgia about that era was based on endless resources such as cheap oil, he would have been in a great position to lead us forward into a needed discussion about consumer economics, international debt, peak oil, global warming and how all the dots connect. This would have left Bush spluttering.
The reason we are in Iraq is simply fear of an era of limits, with resources like oil getting more expensive and less available.
Our foreign policy is based on maintaining cheap resources at the cost of other peoples, using the military to keep them from getting too aggressive in their dissent, in Central America, for example.
These people are crossing our borders at the rate of nearly 10,000 a day, partly as a result of policies that cut down forests for beef cattle and displace peasants from traditional subsistence farming.
This "British Empire Lite" model of colonialism should be recognized for what it is- the source of a lot of anger towards America and one of the prime sources of terrorism. Our foreign policy has been getting more and more ruthless and farther and farther from the values state in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
People who have a reasonable hope for The future don't blow themselves up In a last ditch attempt to have attention paid. We can't end terrorism by throwing gasoline on the fire at every opportunity.
We have sent men and women into Harm's way and to die based on a collossal ignorance of history and mistaken assumptions about our place in it.
If we don't face up to unpleasant truths about what we are doing in the world, and the responsibility we have to History and humankind, we will have extinguished the flame of hope lit by the Founding Fathers two hundred years ago - and lost America.
It is time for our leaders as well as all the rest of us, to wake up to the true nature of the need of the hour, to change the larger political paradigm. A vision of a progressive America that lives in all our best dreams and hopes for the future, and which gave rise to America in the first place is what we need. We need a leadership call for an international coming together of the whole human race to ensure that the maximum number of human beings (and other species) can survive into the 22nd Century, and can look forward to a sustainable prosperity. Getting there won't be easy. But if we trade in our current, nineteenth century mindset to engage all the best and the brightest twenty first century thinking, we at least will not have missed the greatest main chance of the era |
