I want to return to the blissful ignorance I enjoyed while I was frolicking in Europe earlier this month -- on my feet and on the go all day long, enjoying great art, breathtaking landscapes and inspired architecture. And in the evening, kicking back with some refreshing local beers, and some lovely food and wine. No newspapers, no TV, no internet. Forgetting for a while that this world is run by greedy, idiotic bastards who are dragging all of us down with them into their pitiful, toxic stew of incompetence.
I'm starting to think the only way to fight back is to opt out. How can I sit here and insist that there should be no more drilling when I just filled my car up with gas a few days ago? How can I bitch and moan about the toxic sludge spilled at Harriman, TN -- or the coal mined by blasting off the tops of mountains -- when I suck power off of TVA's grid? If I don't stop giving them my money, what incentive do they have to change? Clearly, they need more motivation than they've gotten over the past thirty years.
I wish I knew how to stop it.
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I'm starting to think the only way to fight back is to opt out. How can I sit here and insist that there should be no more drilling when I just filled my car up with gas a few days ago? How can I bitch and moan about the toxic sludge spilled at Harriman, TN -- or the coal mined by blasting off the tops of mountains -- when I suck power off of TVA's grid? If I don't stop giving them my money, what incentive do they have to change? Clearly, they need more motivation than they've gotten over the past thirty years.
I wish I knew how to stop it.
1 comment:
Wow, that spill map sure puts it into perspective. It's HUGE!
As for how to stop the incompetence… I don't know, and I wish I did. I listened to interviews with Barbara Ehrenreich this weekend, and she believes that America's Pollyanna attitude (my words) is a reason for the financial crisis. The current corporate culture is to get along, not point out flaws in management's thinking.
What's interesting about the oil spill is that there doesn't seem to have been any R&D for the last 30 years in the gulf oil industry. I think Norway is ahead of the US/UK there. Sadly, Norway doesn't export its worker safety regulations and wages. Its international oil industry goes where labor is cheap and there is no OSHA. And that's where the pollution, the hazards, the injuries, the deaths are, not here at home. (If they were - and they have been - we'd straighten it up immediately, which we did.)
But how to change the attitude? All I can say is that we have to find a way to make greed unpopular.
Yeah, right.
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