Last week, with the thermometer surpassing “miserable” here in Massachusetts, people hauled out hulking air conditioners and implanted them in windows. The hum of the machines spread out across town sounded like a buzzing swarm of locust to me. Outside, the smog index rose, and the hills in the distance looked like a fuzzy Polaroid. “Ah,” a friend said sardonically,… return to article
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Reader Comments (6)Page 1 of 1 pagesSo what can we do? I’m just one person, I’m not a politician. What can I do to affect real change? It’s pretty hard not to feel powerless. How are we going to change the corrupt system that we live in?
Posted by cocoba on Jul 3, 2007 at 10:40 AM I found the article to be half brilliant and half stupidly irresponsible. Brilliant because it is trying to point out that mass culture change is required to solve the climate change crisis. Stupidly irresponsible because your call to “bring corporate polluters to their knees, oust our lying leaders and undermine a system that favors profit over people” utterly misses the reality of our cultural conundrum. One, what are we suppose to do with our economy on its knees, our leaders ousted, and our “system” undermined. Isn’t it a bit irresponsible to call for destruction without having a positive replacement, even one vague idealistic reference to a replacement? I mean really irresponsible like polluting the planet is irresponsible. Like how a mass media that doesn’t talk about what is really going on is irresponsible. Just as cheap and just as easy.
Two: who, pray tell, can bring polluters to their knees, make leaders tell the truth, and force the system to prefer people over profits. Why it’s the people who have addicted themselves to the goods of our polluting economy, who are so deferential to our lyng leaders, and who sustain with their unbending passivity the system that screws them over and over. And this will go on and on while the Left plays it’s mindlessly righteous tunes and Rome burns.
Get over your addiction to dead ideas that stir your blood with convictions of “justice” and make you feel right and superior, but cannot propose anything feasible. Get real and face the daunting fact that nobody is really addressing what needs to be done. That is, to fashion TOGETHER a new politics out of our intelligence, compassion, and imagination, one that holds ORDINARY PEOPLE accountable for their deference and passivity so that they can take RESPONSIBILITY for their behavior, and thereby tap into their inherent POWER and capacity to COLLABORATE . Then we can begin to create a DEMOCRACY, that can functionally replace our mass-supported oligarchy. Anything else--left, right, or center--is cheap talk.
joncehart
Posted by joncehart on Jul 4, 2007 at 5:10 AM Joncehart - You have it exactly right! We are the problem. There are no “leaders” who are going to try and fix this or any other issue because it’s the right thing to do or because a few people hold a protest or concert. The American people have to want to change and then the “leaders” will follow.
I live in the Midwest, and trust me, 50% or more of the people here still do not believe that Global Warming is a real issue. They feel that Al Gore made it up and that it is a Dem scare tactic.
This past year my family and I have started going green as much as we can. Conserving our water, electricity, going vegetarian etc. I work for a Fortune 500 company and most of my co-workers (college educated people) think I’m out of my mind.
We have to find a way to educate and win over the American people and getting on soap boxes and pontificating will just turn people off.
GRIST, The Daily Show, and Colbert - are all on the right track. We have to educate in an entertaining way and then people will hopefully listen and “get it”.
As the great sage of our age put it, “ Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. “ Kurt Vonnegut
Posted by crossroads3885 on Jul 4, 2007 at 6:10 AM Since any viable left has been dead in this country for years, we may never get beyond “feel good” attempts at solutions to the looming catastrophes that await us. The social changes needed to turn the climate situation around will not take place, and for the same reason that we have such a mess on our hands in the educational and health sectors. We have even outsourced our wars. We have bought into the idea that business, combined with individual initiative, can solve all our problems. It is pretty obvious that this is not true, but on and on we go and the failures mount up.
Posted by Hattie on Jul 4, 2007 at 11:15 AM When will anyone out there writing about global warming learn about the HAARP program? They are experimenting with the Ozone layer of our ionosphere; and DOE is running chemtrails to “adjust” our weather so they can continue damaging our ionosphere. Senate Bill 517 is on the dock to allow this to be funded and continued.
Here is a serious scientific documentary about HAARP:
http://www.guba.com/watch/2000915475?category_id=525&duration_step=0&fil lter_tiny=0&pp=40&sb=5&set=5&sf=0&size_step=0&o=17&s sample=1181546641:75f761e7edefe279f6989f32ce499fed4be2bc87
Posted by Yellowbird on Jul 4, 2007 at 3:56 PM Yellowbird, thanks for that link to the HAARP video. Here are a few initial finds for other resources about HAARP:
# HAARP Home Page, http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
# HAARP.net - The Military’s Pandora’s Box by Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, http://www.haarp.net/
# High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program
# Earthpulse Press: HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Project), http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/
# HAARP - ANGELS DON’T PLAY THIS HAARP, Advances in Tesla Technology, by Jeanne Manning and Dr. Nick Begich, http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/
Posted by admarshall on Jul 11, 2007 at 8:42 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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