We live in the 21st Century.

We have the ability to send probes to the surfaces of other planets and receive video, pictures, and information back. We have the ability for our cars to tell us where to go and if we are lost. Everybody has a personal communication device, most of them small enough to fit in your pocket; some even small enough to fit in a watch. We can send data to the other side of the world so fast that you see virtually no delay and store massive amounts of it on devices as small as your little finger.

The speed at which technology moves these days is stunning. Yet despite all of the intelligent minds that we have at work around the world and all of the mindblowing progress science has made, nobody has come up with a better fuel source than fossil fuels?

Oh, but they have. Alternative fuels to power our homes, our cars and everything else we use on a daily basis have been created and made feasible for a while now. Just go to U.S. Department of Energy website, @ http://www.eere.energy.gov/ to see just some of alternatives out there.

So if we have alternatives to fossil fuels that would free us of our dependence on oil from wealthy Middle East countries and have proven to be non-threatening to our environment, why are we about to pass legislation in this country to start oil production in one of the last pristine environments we have, Alaska?

First of all, haven’t we dumped enough oil into the Alaskan environment?

Second, we don’t need it. Experts agree that the amount of oil that we could extract from Alaska would only make a negligible difference to our current demands. But this isn’t about weaning America from Saudi oil, it’s about U.S. oil companies making even more money by raping our environment.

And we are about to sit back and let it happen.

Even if this sounds like tree-hugging, Greenpeace caca to you, we as a society are fast approaching a time when we won’t be able to bury our minds in Everybody Loves Raymond and our latest purchases, and will have to face the reality that we have fucked our children.

Because we had the chance to do something.

And we didn’t. We sold them out for plasma screens and sitcoms. We allowed ourselves to be dumbed down and purchased. The scary and somewhat sad part is that it really wasn’t that difficult or expensive.

It reminds me of something that I learned about as a kid that always amazed me. I learned it from one of my favorite books “Where the Red Fern Grows,” by Wilson Rawls.

In the book, a boy learns how easy it is to catch racoons. All one has to do is bore out a 1″ wide, 4″ deep hole in the top of an old tree stump, drive nails down from the outside edges at an angle, and drop something shiny down to the bottom. When the racoon would see the ’shiny’ down at the bottom of this hole, it would stick its paw into the hole to grab it. Once it made a fist by grabbing the object, it couldn’t withdraw its hand because the nails prevented it. To escape, all the racoon had to do was let go of the object and it could pull its paw out. Thus saving its life.

The racoons never did though.

To its own demise, the racoon was incapable of letting go of the “shiny” and seeing “the big picture.” So it would remain there, stuck, until the trapper would come by and slaughter it.

Bright, huh?

I don’t see how we are any different. The traps have been set, we have our ’shinys’ and we aren’t letting go.

Even to our own demise.

It could be different though. Skip one sitcom a week and write an e-mail to your local Senator, or Congressman. Let them know that you and the people you know will make it your life’s work to vote them out come election time. Then follow through. Lest we forget, it is a government for and by the people. They work for us and when they fuck us we aren’t going to stand for it. Eventually, our government will get the point.

And if they don’t then we will get rid of it and try something new. We did it in the 1700s. The French did it too.

We can do it again.

At this point, you can say “Well said. Fuck ‘em.” and then go back to surfing the Net thinking that someone else will take the 1 hour that it takes to write in and make a difference. Sad thing is that the majority of people think exactly the same way and don’t do anything.

Be different.

Read something:

U.S. Department of Energy
Alaskan Oil Drilling
Alaskan Oil Spills
Natural Resources Conservation
Effects of Television

Do something:

Write your Senator!
Write your Congressperson!
Greenpeace

Post by Colton Telford
mustardnut@gmail.com
despicable horses