America used to be called “the land of opportunity” in better times before our economy tanked. Today cries ring out at Tea Party rallies about “taking the country” back, or to be more accurate, taking the country backward. The fact is the ‘good old days’ weren’t equally good for everyone and the policies of the recent past benefited a favored few and increased the disparity between the rich and average Americans.
Angry voices rise in a chorus of generalities about fiscal rectitude, smaller government, patriotism and religion. Without the vaguest idea of how to actually govern or where they see the country’s fortunes emerging, dissenters wave flags, hoist posters and protest against imaginary threats raised by media radicals and self-interested politicians.
Newt Gingrich says legislation should be passed forbidding the use of Sharia Law here, a risk that doesn’t exist in most rational people’s minds. And much time has been spent by him and others railing against the Islamic cultural center slated to be built at a site two blocks from “Ground Zero” in New York. Forgotten, or largely unknown, Muslims who worked in the Twin Towers were, without objection, provided with a “prayer room” for their religious observances. They perished along with workers of all faiths on 9/11.
We are beset by narrow-minded, unimaginative political activists who, in addition to their limited social vision, claim their policies are entrepreneur-friendly when they are in fact conservative theories run amok in the face of economic hardship. Anything truly innovative is shouted down by congressional naysayers who refuse to acknowledge, for example, that relying on a carbon-dependent construct will only hold us back as a country, harm the environment and fail to provide jobs for our domestic workforce in an increasingly competitive world marketplace. The founders wanted to protect smaller states from being overwhelmed by the numerical superiority of larger states, but today, equality of representation in the Senate has led to an obstructionism that confounds reason.
Former president Clinton has been exploring ways to implement his “global initiative” and President Obama wants to expand green-energy projects that would, as both he and Clinton point out, lead to industrial expansion and job creation. But senators from smaller states like Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe, in tail-wagging-the-dog-mode claim theories of global warming are a giant hoax and clutch at straws of inconsistencies to buttress their dubious position. Unfortunately he and other deniers successfully stymie efforts to confront environmental issues despite scientific opinion that suggests the extreme weather events we have been experiencing are the result of climate change, global warming, call it what you will.
In his column, NY Times, 9/19/10, Tom Friedman writes that, “While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.” Resistance to addressing our energy dilemma is more than a little troubling because we could make great strides in terms of the environment and jobs if we just began retrofitting existing buildings using green technologies, for example, as Clinton has suggested. And Friedman references Mike Biddle, a businessman whose company invented a process to separate plastic from piles of recycled material.
Most of Biddle's workers, however, are in countries where recycling mandates are national policy, practices Biddle tried to convince Congress to copy in this country without success. The process his company developed makes it possible to create “new plastic using less than 10 percent of the energy required to make virgin plastic from crude oil.” As Friedman points out Biddle was able to pursue his recycling innovations with “seed money … provided mostly by U.S. taxpayers through federal research grants.” So “we educated him, we paid for his tech breakthroughs - - and now Chinese and European workers will harvest his fruit. Aren’t we smart?”
Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell warns that some American scientific companies are engaged in the dangerous practice of cross-breeding humans and animals and have produced mice “with fully-functioning human brains.” But she’s got it backwards. It’s right-wing extremist humans with fully-functioning mouse brains and a skewed set of values who pose the greatest threat to the country.
