Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everybody! Seriously. I watched the President give a speech at a Maytag factory in Iowa today and he said something very important about our dependence on oil. "So we shift from shock to indifference time and again, year after year." I think that this is the fundamental problem with Americans today: indifference. Obama bravely said that he refused to believe that Americans want to stay the same, that, "So the implication in this argument is that we've somehow lost something important -- that perhaps because of the very prosperity we've built over the course of generations, that we've given up that fighting American spirit, that sense of optimism, that willingness to tackle tough challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, the notion that we've gotten soft somehow. I reject that argument." I think that that American spirit died a long time ago. If I/We are comfortable and can drive an SUV and buy the new CDs and buy the new computers and throw everything away, then why would we try to live any differently? He forgets his American history. The American spirit was train barons, land owners who monopolized beef, mining companies that used children, steel mills that had 10 hour work days, Giant oil companies that had to be split up under anti-monopoly laws. That is how the America today became America. 

Does that mean that I think that we should loosen up labor laws or get rid of anti-monopoly laws? No. I just want to drive home the point that no matter how much Obama tries to change the American culture, that it is really really up to us: the Americans. The right will try to say that there is no climate change, or that it is not man made. They'll say that Obama is socializing companies or that he is following in Hitler and Mussolini's foot prints, and the people that they reach, their demographic, believe it. They would rather be "right" then change the wold to be a better place.

Asking the American people to come out of indifference and make a change is asking a lot Mr. President. Not while Wal-Mart has such low low prices.