The Real Problem With Global Warming

I just came back from a trip to the Historic Triangle of Virginia (Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown), mostly to have a brief time out from work which followed me anyway, but also to enjoy a little of the history display at the Victory Center in Yorktown. The exhibits were very interesting, featuring a live camp and original farm outside the museum center, and a host of historical information. In case you forgot from the 5th grade, Yorktown is where George Washington teamed up with the French to trap Cornwallis and end the Revolutionary War in 1781. If you have any English, British or United Kingdom nationals as acquaintenances (Boy, they go by a lot of aliases over there) they will be quick to refer to you as a colonist to this day, even when you have to remind them that we had to come save their behinds from the Germans.

It is a helpful reminder to me that in those days news had to travel far, letters were considered the FedEx of the day and if you were a military commander you could send an IM out on horseback that would only take a few hours or days to reach the "recipient." Most news traveled by horseback, and we all know how reliable information becomes after it is passed along a few times. I have a few friends I can think of that would have been perfect for that job...

I can't imagine how anyone knew anything unless it just happened a farm over in the woods, but I also imagine it was not a big issue to those early Americans who were relatively preoccupied with that survival thing. Today, we get our coffee going and hit the PC for a taste of the news, mortified at the goings-on in who-knows-where as we shuffle the kids off to school and put in a good days work. I was being kind to the other 250 million of us that wait until we get to work to check the news on the company's time. We know more about how safe a street corner is in downtown Iraq than we do about that big accident that happened a few miles away. I can't even get a local channel close enough on the dish to listen in to what is happening to Aunt Fanny down the street, I have to check in to Aunt Fanny that lives in Atlanta, San Francisco or New York for my dose of local living. I even have a fully automated check out at the Wal-Mart so I don't even have the inconvenience of having to speak to a check out clerk. We have traded global information for local isolation, and I wonder sometimes where that "information" really comes from.

I guess I should get back to the point, today we have a wealth of information at our fingertips, we can Google someone right up and figure out if they are worthy to be our neighbor, or listen to any and all opinions on any and all subjects at any time of the day or night. In the old days it seems people were a little more authentic in their speech, the message that they wanted to get across was thought out and prepared for some public occasion or not given at all. I wonder if Patrick Henry would shout out in downtown Richmond, VA today, "Give me a safe enironment, or give me death!" He might have swayed a few people.

Truth is, I am not sure who to listen to these days because I have no idea who is authentic. I am pretty sure that Patrick Henry got his message across because people knew he was taking a huge risk in speaking out, but in today's world we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of information and have no idea where it is coming from. I have a reasonable degree of certainty that Patrick Henry spoke his own mind, and was not representing some politically charged think tank's opinion of how the Brits were over taxing the colonies and suppressing personal freedoms. I have heard plenty of opinions and I guess the consensus is that we have a global warming problem, but to what extent, who knows the real deal, how do we fix it and where do we go from here? I can't tell if Al Gore is right because he has time to sit in his well lit and energy devouring home and hand pick self-promoting reports on the issue, or if the Bush Administration can overlook the big business implications on the economy that they get graded on each week long enough to give me the real answer.

I just don't see how we get together on this issue with everyone pulling at the end of the rope, trying every trick they can think of to get people on "their" side. Last time I checked, we were all in this one together. What is missing today is a spokesperson that is authentic, someone with no other stake in the game that knows the score and is willing to tell us with no agenda. Not sure how that person ever gets the information they need from an unbiased source, or how they get the information to us from an unbiased source, or why they would be interested in the job at all, but that is what is missing. We have created a culture of people who are leading our nation with little to no authenticity-and people know it! You can see that from the approval polls on our government from common people, nobody trusts people in power because they cannot be seen as genuinely interested in the well being of our nation and our planet without some other motivation. Perhaps it is time for a change, maybe the best medicine for us would be to dump the whole batch and only allow people to be elected to higher office who have never been elected before, who make less than $100,000 per year. Its all a game so far, we keep spinning our wheels with no decisions that help anyone, on issues from global warming to social security, because there is no one we can trust to be authentic in government.

Benjamin Franklin put it best when he told the rest of the Declaration of Independence signers, "From here on out we hang together, or we surely will hang separately."