Love It Or Leave It

Asking why politicians are so eager to pin the rise in energy to speculators, the answer is that it lets them believe that we don't have to adapt to a world of expensive gas.

This isn't my observation, it was Paul Krugman's, but I think he's dead on. If we assume for a minute that this is correct, then what it does is completely validate nearly everything the Monologues has written about over the last 6 months.

Blaming speculation, the people who do this, have the same mindset that promotes the booming Indian gaming industry in the Sacramento region; the same mindset that makes Six Flags an attractive destination instead of our own neighborhoods and communities; the same mindset as to why we can't live without our stuff and we can't live with it either. It's the mindset that we Americans, by birthright, ought to blame others for our own bad behaviors.

It's speculation, not our own consumption. We are entitled to unearned riches with one pull of a slot machine. We incessantly motor about our own communities, turning them into freeway slums and parking lots, and flee to Sea World to walk and socialize at the human scale. We are entitled to so much material wealth that we shuttle a third of it off into personal storage pods.

I completely disagree that we live in the best nation on earth, or that this pathetic mantra of "love it or leave it" somehow dictates that I can't disagree with what I see around me. This is a nation full of overfed, overweight, indebted, entitled, non-sustainable consumptive slobs. Soon, a quarter of the 'finest nation on earth's' population will suffer from type II diabetes. A fifth of this 'great society' won't have access to basic health care. It's son's and daughter's will be conscripted into service to wage resource wars against future economic terrorists.

This thing is, almost everything I decry, everything I want to see different, everything! can be rectified through energy scarcity. So if this be due to speculation; play on.