Day 19

Gee, today is Glenn Beck day in our Nation's Capital. He has been inviting his fans to attend a march to protest - something - spending by the government, socialism, takeover of our freedoms, high taxes, pork, but mostly just Obama. And they have arrived - thousands of them. The crowd is virtually all white, mostly middle age and older, and very angry at something they can't quite seem to articulate. Signs like "Christ is the Messiah, not Obama" say a great deal but nothing coherent. Another is perhaps more revealing but unintentionally so, "Obama, we have waken up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist unamerican Acorn groups and arrogant wife back to your own country and strip their rights away!" The reality seems to be that these people just can't take living in a world where their kind (white, conservative, inarticulate, authoritarian, fundamentalist, uneducated) are not in charge as they have been for the last eight years. If it were not so scary it would be funny. If this is the face of the future I don't think I want to go there.

This is a pretty clear example of what has long been predicted by those who study the impacts of scarcity, overcrowding, and financial insecurity. One of the points often made in studies of the social consequences of resource depletion and the resulting loss of opportunity is that people will look for villains to blame for their misfortune and fear rather than acknowledge the physical reality behind their plight. We live in such a time. Actual income has been declining for the middle class since 1970. All avenues for advancement are shrinking. College costs are up dramatically and continue to rise. Most of the main cost of living factors - food, energy, housing, education, medical care - have increased in price steadily over the last three decades with no end in sight. This breaks on Obama's watch because he is a perfect target for the anger that has been building up for so long. America is a very racist nation and always has been - however much we want to see ourselves otherwise. The anger directed at Obama and his family should come as no surprise given that large numbers of whites have always resented minorities, foreigners, elites, and anyone who is clearly different from themselves. To have someone like that in charge - as President of THEIR country - is a personal offense they can't abide.

The reality is that America - and the rest of the world - is now and has been for some time, bumping up against physical limits that cannot be transcended. The total amount of energy available per capita worldwide peaked in 1969. Oil production peaked in America at around the same time and in the world at large in 2005. While the amount of fossil fuel available per person continues to shrink the demand continues to grow - as does the population. This is a formula for disaster - as is quite clear, but it is consistently ignored by those in power. No politician who admitted to this would be elected. Remember what happened to Jimmy Carter when he suggested that we needed to conserve energy? Gone! In comes Ronnie with his "Morning in America" message and rips the solar panels off the White House roof - to much cheering from the same crowd that is protesting today in DC. Yet all it takes is to look closely at the numbers - available energy, cost of living, preventable diseases, resource wars, percentage of the population incarcerated, savings rate - to see that it was really twilight in America. All factors of distress have been increasing for decades even as we fool ourselves that we have the best health care system in the world, the healthiest economy, the freest people, brightest future. Sorry, ain't so. And blaming politicians - of either party - is way off base. There is plenty of blame to go around but it has to do with our willingness to lie to ourselves and deny logic and evidence when it points to conclusions we find uncomfortable. The government lies to us, businesses lie to us, the news media lie to us, and worst of all - we lie to ourselves. We really have no one else to blame for our plight. We know the world is finite. We know that resources can't be extracted forever. We know that the economy cannot continue to grow indefinitely. We know that our children will NOT be better off than we are. Worst, we know that with only 5% of world population we consume more than 25% of all its resources - food, water, oil, coal, timber, metals, consumer goods - and there is no way that the rest of the world can achieve this same level of profligate consumption. Nor is there any way we can continue it indefinitely either. But, no one will face this and consider the eventual consequences. Thus we get misdirected protests against 'socialists' that don't exist. It's fantasy over reality yet again.