Environment

Crisis and Sacrifice

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Image by "gremlin" from the BP oil spill logo contest.

I've been thinking about this piece by David Sirota in which he quoted FDR.

"Every single person in the United States is going to be affected," Roosevelt said. "[Business] profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation ... [Americans] will have to forgo higher wages ... All of us are used to spending money for things that we want, things, however, which are not absolutely essential. We will all have to forgo that kind of spending."

It's been years since a president asked Americans to deviate from their routines in order to support a national effort to mitigate a crisis. I get the very real sense that consumerism has become so crucial to the buoyancy of our economy that any deviation would be very bad. Either that, or we've all become so self-absorbed and we've externalized the reality of a crisis that pushing for collective sacrifice would fall on deaf ears. It's probably all three factors, actually.

And then there's this new conservative contrarian movement. The opposition party and its affiliates have constructed an opposite-day platform: we believe the opposite of anything the president, the Democrats and the progressives say, regardless of whether it's contradictory, crazy or stupid.

Tagged onto this movement is a backwards, willfully ignorant meme about the president being a Nazi of some sort, which, of course, is insane. Glenn Beck is partly responsible with his very, very inaccurate "Obama" = "Progressive" = "Socialist" = "National Socialist Workers Party" = "Nazi" equation. Oh, and he might be Muslim. The first ever black, Muslim Nazi. Somehow. With such a usurper of all things American in the White House, the president, they say, has to indoctrinate people so they'll buy into his ruse.

So if the president asked Americans to sacrifice by driving less, by carpooling, by eating less meat, or by riding a bicycle, the entire Republican Party would loudly protest: the president is trying to indoctrinate us and take away our freedoms! And so any national effort to address the oil spill and the tragic consequences of oil consumption would very likely not work.

There's no harm in trying, of course, but the chorus of screeching would render it practically ineffectual in terms of impact.