Back in college, prominent Americans used to arrive at our school for a lecture series, nearly monthly. There were Charles Kurault, Alexander Haig, Steve Allen, Ben Vereen, Allen’s wife (whose face is right in my head right now, but whose name I’m too lazy to look up — and who was, by all accounts, not a very nice person in real life), Charlton Heston – the list far out-paces my memory banks.
Recall interviewing many of them, but the only one who left me utterly starstruck, gobsmacked and dorky was — Kurault. A true journalist and soft soul, he was simply wonderful in person. And I was tongue-tied, just a mass of lame unholiness. Mumbled something erudite and profound, along the lines of “love your work” and turned crimson, my sweaty little palm grazing his big, encompassing paw. Nothing like an original line from a cool customer.
Of all these, I remember very little of what was said. And the one man whose words resonate with me nearly every day — I do not recall his name. He was utterly brilliant though. What he said, what runs through my head an average of once a week, was this:
“Civilizations die out not from the questions they ask and the challenges they meet, but from the challenges they failed to meet because of the questions they refused to ask.“
At the time, at a sage old 19 or 20, I remember thinking, “Huh?”
He went on to cite the oft-used example of The Roman Empire. Which, you know, means not a whole hell of a lot to modern teens, even though we were all forced to read about it endlessly in history classes throughout school.
And yet, his words really do haunt me, now, in the face of what is happening in our nation and the world.
Food has risen 82 percent in cost over the past four years. My stimulus check will yield approximately 6-8 weeks of groceries, or roughly one car payment and one house payment. Not to complain about the money (except for the fact that it feels like the Bush administration is a cheap John and we’re all a bunch of classless hookers for taking it and, they hope, shutting the hell up). Just to say that it is a band-aid placed over the bloody stump of our middle class arm.
The NYT reported today what we’ve known and done absolutely squat about in nearly 40 years:
“OPEC’s 13 members plan to spend $150 billion to expand their capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012. But OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq — where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production — reaching that level will be impossible.”
The questions we refused to ask ourselves, or really try to answer, are closing in around us like Poe’s Cask of Amontillado, and we are going to go out by immurement just as frighteningly and tragically. There is simply not enough oil to sustain our planet beyond a certain point, and that point was known to us for quite some time. Ethanol production is contributing to third-world country starvation and food riots as we divert the grain, and the long-range prospects for ethanol as a viable substitute to oil do not look good.
Perhaps they would have looked much better, had we started in earnest working on that production in the 1970’s.
No amount of US hegemony, even if it does result in controlling the oil reserves of Iraq and Iran, will be a magic bullet and produce more oil than what reserves the Earth currently holds. So, while we’re busily spending billions a week, trying to hang-on to our fantasy of dominance in the 21st century and the gravy train for a (comparatively speaking) select few, doing so through needless slaughter of Iraqi people and our own children, we’re still doing absolutely nothing for our future. In fact, if we diverted that money into alternative fuel research, we could possibly actually change the course of our collective destiny.
And we could have done it a whole hell of a lot better if we’d not been afraid to ask the questions and search for the right answers, back when we first knew what was coming.
Everything we have hinges on oil. Our entire society, from the keyboard I’m typing at to the cigarette in my hand to the car I take to work to the computer at my work station to the seat my butt will park in for 8 hours there. Everything. And we, like the junkies we all really are, refuse to consider the fact that our habit is growing worse even as our supply dwindles. Mad oil consumption in China as well as our own predilection for homes and vehicles two and three times larger than anything really necessary are just versions of us giving the giant middle finger to reality.
We’re not just failing to ask the right questions, we’re deliberately driving ourselves to the wrong answers. And frankly, at the risk of sounding gloom and doom, I truly believe it is almost too late to formulate the right questions and find the right answers in time. But certainly the past eight years have done nothing but set us back even further.
