Monday, March 21, 2011

Lesson of the Week; Central Issue of Our Time

What digby said,

The big lesson of this past week of nuclear accidents and air strikes in the Middle East is obvious: we are entering a new phase of our ongoing energy crisis. With half of America now not believing in climate change and thinking everything can be solved with drill, baby, drill I'm not too optimistic. It's closely related to the plutocratic dominance of our political system and is the central issue of our time.

This strikes me as summing up the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, quite nicely.

When I began (the predecessor of) this blog, I actually naively believed that the country and the world might come to some positive, reasonable consciousness about the coincidence peak oil, climate change, ecological catastrophe. I thought the inevitable disasters (my "coming perfect storm") -- later manifest as Iraq, Katrina, the Global Financial Crisis -- would prompt a revolution of sorts, as the old elite and a discredited philosophy gave way to a new generation, and a new awareness. (Hah!)

Instead, the storm came, and what was revealed was that a predatory financial system had taken over the government, in league with big oil and the military-industrial complex. What was revealed was the incompetence of the elite, their sheer inability to prepare for, or deal sensibly, with any political or economic development.

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