Rob wrote:

When they begin to see their children die, when their spouses likewise pass away because of a lack of this or that medication or other medical service, when they witness friends and/or relatives being murdered…

The developing world is full of places where people live with great hardship, without civil or social safety nets and few modern amenities. Look at the misery and pain wrought by Katrina, and how the plight of its victims is becoming background noise, part of the norm. You don’t see Katrina survivors in the clocktowers with sniper rifles. It’s still a tenuous and debatable theory to say that the party in power will suffer political consequences this Fall.

Katrina exposes the lie of American exceptionalism underlying the notion that there will be hell to pay when Americans lose their privileges. After a few short-lived bouts of impotent rage (like at the NO Superdome) we are most likely to just become sadder, poorer and more bewildered, like people in the developing world everywhere…

And as another poster observed, we have continued to dismantle and turn away from New Deal and Great Society-style programs—state intervention in the economy, mandates and regulations, even (god forbid) centralized planning—that would give us a low-energy future that looks more like Europe and less like Algeria or Brazil.

Allyse,

Are you suggessting Americans consider ratcheting back our profligate consumption of gasoline? I hope that's not what you're suggessting because in the mind of this SUV driving, steak eating, bible-thumpin American, that's tantamout to letting the terrorists win! Look, it should be clear what God's plan is: He put the oil under the Muslims soil cause he knew we'd invent Hummers and Escalades that would need the Muslim's oil and then we would be motivated to go and convert them to the world's one true relgioin: hard right evangelical Christianity. If this wasn't the case, he wouldn't have caused all those Diebold machines in Ohio and Florida to turn for our great leader, George W. Bush. Yous see God supports Bush and thus intervened in both the 2000 and 2004 elections cause he knew Bush is gonna do the right thing to those godless savages in the Mideast: nuke their ass and take their gas! And then I hope he rounds up all you commie, godless liberals and put them in Halliburton built detention camps. That'll cut down on traffic and give me the opportunity to drive over your bulbous shaped hybrids with my brand new Urban Assault Vehicle!

Bob in Alabama

Bob,

Just you try it. I'll set my dogs on you!

-Allyse in California

Thank you for sending over YOUR best and brightest

to get the party started, eh?

The good old days in pre-overcomsumptive America weren't that good. Having 1 car per family meant that the car was much more precious, which meant that only the male members of the family were allowed to use it. Women can't really walk anywhere anyway, because the men will sexually abuse them. Which is way a man can walk or ride a bike to work and a woman can't. Women's liberation has everything to do with the automobile. When women got their own cars and could then drive to work and schools and shops they became liberated. In countries where there are few cars, women are almost completely housebound or can only walk around in broad daylight in groups. Women didn't become liberated in this country because American men are more enlightened. Men are basically control freak, horny self-centered bastards who only care about their own best interests. It's because women can drive down the freeway with the car door locked and not have to depend on a male as an escort. If society went back to owning one car per family, it would be just like in the good old days when women were housebound and consticted.

Whether we run out of oil, or it just gets expensive, the problem is with how decisions are made and how people react to information about their future. Most are bumbling through life trying to feed their families on the information they have been spoonfed through a life of consolidated corporate-influenced schools and business-as-usual politics and television. What is the Net Creative purpose of our species? Is it to use up as many resources as we can steal? Or is it to create a future that is reasonably sustainable in the long term? The answers won't just pop out of a Sex and the City DVD or a Discovery Channel Ivy League Grant-sucking Special. We all have to start thinking critically about the blind faith we have had in systems, governments, dogma, and history. When we truly dig into the information being spewed forth about terrorism, oil supplies, voting machines, corruption, and yes, science, we find that there are more vacant spaces between the supporting nodes than we ever imagined. The ITER fusion reactor, ethanol, modern schools, and government checks and balances all depend on a lack of critical thinking to maintain their cashflows. The government has NEVER come clean about it's acquisition of German scientists in WWII, let alone about secret technologies, human experiments, and blackmailed politicians. As long as we worry about where our next Hostess Ho-Ho's are coming from, we won't look into the dark corners of our own consumptive addictions. America isn't addicted just to oil, President Bush: America is addicted to someone using oil to do everything for them. Energy provides us with the equivalent of 100 slaves at our disposal. Some of those slaves are chained via electricity and "always low prices" and are real people. Some are just the virtual slaves of fuel in our vehicles. We are currently in a war with the planet, not terrorists. If we win, we get to use up all the resources, and we lose later. If we lose to Nature, perhaps something else will evolve to take our place. In the meantime, we need to rethink how much we do is really necessary and providing structure for our future, and how much of what we do is feeding anachronistic power mongers and their Hummer driving corporate lackeys. "Service Economy" My A**!!

Buy less, buy local, let the Republicorps and Democorps die a slow death of starvation. We don't need them. We have the technology to create a new world right in our backyards and communities. It doesn't have to be hard, it just has to be thoughtful and cooperative, rather than addictive and competitive.