a friend of mine once expressed the unpleasant political reality like this:  you ask an affluent First World inhabitant to get real and decide which is more important, driving their car or feeding their kids.  they blink a couple of times and (most of them) say staunchly:  Feed the kids, forget the goddamn car.

but if you ask them which is more important, driving their car or feeding someone else's kids -- especially someone else who is poor and/or darker-skinned and/or speaks a different language and/or lives more than 30 miles away -- then you are likely to get a different and depressing answer.  and when I think about oil prices and the end of the cheap energy regime, this is what depresses me.

it's not so much that I think "we are all doomed and the human story is over" as that I think very large numbers of us may be doomed unless we learn to think and act in a very different way --r and we have a long record of learning disabilities and truancy in this area...


The difference between theory and practise in practise ...