July 8, 2008

The July 4th weekend this year was a time for many of us to reflect upon the state of our worlds: personally, nationally, and globally. In restaurants, on the streets, in shops, on radio, I heard my fellow citizens ruminating on the State of the Nation on its birthday weekend. There was, of course, much talk of the price of gasoline with heated conversations pro and con of off shore drilling and opening up parts of Alaska for more oil exploration. Hudson was bursting with visitors and speculation was that folks that might have wandered further chose not to due to the price of gas and the availability of the train to Hudson; every one was sold out.

While we barbequed our way through the weekend, the world went on, providing much fodder for deck conversations for those who wanted a dose of reality with their barbeque. A front-page weekend article of the New York Times did a fine job of reminding us that for the last quarter century the current gas crisis has been coming toward us while we fiddled as Rome burned, so to speak. We actually should have seen it coming after the oil crisis of the 1970's and we didn't want to; it was easier to slip back into the stream of cheap oil that was flowing over us and play like an ostrich.

Some have said that it has been a part of the "social contract" of our government with its citizenry that we should have cheap gasoline. Makes me wonder if that is true, isn't it rather like the "social contract" that Rome had with its citizens. We give you bread and circuses; you don't cause us trouble.

Remember the famous [prescient?] speech Eisenhower gave warning us about the rising might of the Military Industrial Complex? [He must have seen a Dick Cheney in the future.] If failed energy policy is a product of the machinations of the Military Industrial Complex, was cheap oil their version of bread and circuses to keep us distracted from the world around us?

Our energy policy failure is resulting in everyone pointing fingers at everyone else. It wasn't Congress; it was the automakers. No, it was the public!

We are all to blame.

One of the themes I heard this weekend when talk turned serious was that our days of distraction seem to be coming to an end as we are moving through sea changes in the American economic hegemony of the last sixty years.

The U.S. is being catapulted into the real world these days, with hard, if not harsh, truths catching up with us. Even if we drill everywhere, in every conceivable spot, it will be years before that oil begins to have an effect. During that waiting period, the exploding economies of India and China will be sucking up the extra capacity, as they will for every gallon we conserve.

We are living through an enormous transformation, one that would not have been predicted in the year 2000. My most indelible moment of the July 4th weekend came on Sunday, at a barbeque at the home of my friends Chris and David, who live in a lovely restored Dutch brick home on Chris's family farm of many generations. The house is surrounded by beautiful fields of corn growing high and proud. On the lush and lovely summer night, I wandered through the gardens near the house, a recollection of English gardens, plotted and manicured, surrounded by the hum of a working farm.

This beautiful piece of Americana is threatened by all the global factors working on us. As we enjoyed the beauty of the evening, I was acutely aware of the struggle this family is having keeping their farm a working farm in their family. T. Boone Pickens, a quintessential oilman, is betting the future on wind power. At 80, he wants to use what is left of his life to influence the future and energize that future with new fuels.

The America we knew is not the America we are becoming; we still have time to make choices though the time is running out.