Money, so they say is the root of all evil today-pink floyd

One note about this article. In an effort to be as precise I have taken a page from the book of William F. Buckely. I will employ extremely specific words in an effort to avoid falling into Jejune (his favorite word meaning dull or lacking maturity) arguments.

Sometimes when I stop and think I find it hard to continue on. When I think about how many lives my European ancestors destroyed so that I could live the way I do it hurts. When I think about how my Puritan ancestors (I am a New Englander if you couldn’t tell already) escaped religious intolerance to enforce their own extreme intolerance of everyone except themselves I despise myself. When I think about the butchering of the majority of the indigenous peoples and the few that managed to escape the insatiable appetite of the white man to live in poverty on worthless land or run casinos I want to cry. When I think about how much our society has twisted and destroyed nature to better suit our moods I am so angry I don’t know what to do. When I think about the deep-seated racism and sexism that we have painted over and pretend doesn’t exist anymore I want to seclude myself in a cave. What makes me the angriest though, is that I know on some level it is unproductive for me to get so angry. Should I really carry around the guilt from crimes committed by men long dead before I was born? The answer to this is complicated and depends what I want. If I want a happy and simple life then the answer is a most emphatic ‘no.’ If, however, which is true for now, I want to be able to be part of a tool for change, then the answer is ‘yes.’ Side note here, don’t worry about a political plug here, these problems and their subsequent solutions go far beyond any single individual.

Let me try to use this rage productively. I do not believe that I am the only one with these thoughts. If the American citizens that were on some level guilty of what I mentioned above, which is the majority but not by much, only thought of their guilt, then our economy would be in shambles. Well, our economy is in shambles (one simple fact: 1.4 trillion US treasury debt to China that we can barely manage to pay the interest on.) so that is not a good conclusion to my point. To be serious, the truth is ugly and scary, and so as rational actors we construct our own palatable fantasies. These fantasies are both necessary and useful. Unless someone has served in active combat duty, they have no conception of war. Yet non-veterans still support war, in part because they think they know what it is from Hollywood tripe and other equally meaningless abstractions.


The world is a scary place and people aren’t stupid. If you can’t easily fix a scary think then you avoid it. Who cares if the Kosavars don’t like the Serbs to someone who just bought a new car and is tooling around their suburb where the most dangerous issue is bored teenagers huffing duct sealant? (scary, but not as scary as ethnic cleansing were militias butcher entire families with knives.) If you can choose, why think about bad stuff that you can’t change?


This question gets at the catch 22 of the problem. If you don’t care, then you can’t change it. If you do care then you might be able to change it. But its not as simple as that. By caring you can get so overwhelmed that you can never get to the point where change is possible. This is the trap that many idealists fall into.


Let’s get specific. What is the solution to the Serbia-Kosovo conflict? It sure is not the policy the world’s policeman is pursuing, which in my humble and uniformed opinion seems to be nothing. Kosavars, for good or bad, are practicing limited sovereignty, potentially a viable solution to ethnic cleansing. Perhaps, not. The problem is that they are establishing a precedent and the world’s policeman is having no say in this. I don’t see why the Iraqis can’t say “Hey America, you let the Kosavars separate from the Serbs. You are inconsistent in getting angry at the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds when they try to do the same thing.” Granted there are differences between the two cases. In Iraq we invaded their country on pretexts that turned out to be false and destroyed their political and economic infrastructure with a voracious ferocity that any terrorist group would love. In Serbia Clinton managed to stop the ethnic cleansing with precise military missions. You might call Clinton’s intervention war, but then what term do you use to describe a conflict such as that thing that happened from 1940-1946 known in some circles as World War Two?


I don’t want to criticize the Iraq conflict in this post. What I want to talk about is what we need for meaningful change. We need to convince each person it is important to turn apathy off and compassion on. I have a perhaps misplaced faith in people. I believe when they truly understand how horrible the world is they will no longer be content with their cars, their TVs, and their other cheap Chinese toys that have been loaned them. They will work together to change this world in the little ways they can.


One popular apathetic response is that “it doesn’t matter, I’m just one person and what I do does not matter.” To this I would say yes and no. While it is true you are one person, you are also part of a larger society. Let me give an example of how powerful Americans can be when they work together. Consider this fact: “The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources—burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas.”(from http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810#4 accessed 7:22 AM April 3, 2008)


These impressive numbers did not come about because Americans are bad people, although they act like it a lot. It came about because in the fifties the government was able to convince everyone that owning a house and a car was the American dream. A house and a car are cool things, I have both, but if I didn’t have them would I be less of an American? The sad truth is that yes, I would. Public transportation outside of a few areas is quite poor and in the kind of inflation without growth we are experiencing, (some people call it stagflation) renting is an unattractive option. Through billions of advertising dollars we have become the largest consumers in the world. So here is the problem. Those billions of advertising have created the multi trillion dollar industries that are involved with energy, production, and housing. They would exist anyway, we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of major corporations, but our conspicuous consumption allows them to exist in their current bloated form. They have an incredibly powerful interest in maintaining the status quo. If we drop consumption of oil by 5% that would entail such catastrophic losses to shareholders and executives in oil distribution companies, that they will fight to the death to make sure those consumption numbers go higher. Question: what is an endeavourer that would require a lot of oil and that people feel uncomfortable, at least in the beginning, criticizing? That’s right boys and girls! WAR! It might spawn new terrorist cells, kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and disrupt the lives of millions of others, but if you want to make sure to use a lot of oil, war is your man.


How do we stop this? We need our passion to overcome the immense power of money. This has never happened before in the history of the world. I think now might be a good time to start a new trend.