Reply #35: It's still a democracy, Jake

[pscot]

and we get what we deserve. We're crying now, but two months ago everyone but a few wacked out environmentalists were singing the same tune: drill, baby, drill. There was no public outcry for mass transit or green energy. We were and are still insisting on our god-given right to drive down to 7-11 for a slurpy and eat rock-hard tomatoes in January. Nobody wants to live in an apartment near the job, when we can commute 70 miles a day to our suburban chateaux. We still love our Walmarts and Costcos, fed by an endless conveyor of gas-guzzling big rigs, which are fed in turn, by container ships from all over the globe, all burning oil. But never mind that. We gotta have it. Gotta have our plastic conveniences. And god help the politician who suggests that there may be limits to our affluence, our wars, our happy motoring. We've all bought into the American model; American affluence, American exceptionalism, American global hegemony; even the poor slobs whose jobs have been shipped overseas so the rest of us can party on. Neither they nor the rest of us question the model. Of course they feel burned because they've lost their place at the table, but neither they nor the rest of us care that we're cooking the planet, demolishing the species who share it with us and melting the ice-caps and glaciers. The Louisiana Chamber of Commerce is going ahead as planned with ther annual celebration of the shrimp and oil industries; bigger than ever this year, because they been doing it for thirty years now and still don't see the irony.