An Optimist's Critique

Описание: MY DEAR FELLOW CITIZENS, it’s been several months since we last spoke, and we remain grateful to you all for your support for our National Optimists Party during our last election campaign, the momentous presidential elections of two thousand and eight. From that time to this, we have remained respectfully silent in deference to our duly elected leaders, granting them ample time to begin to craft and enact policies suitable to our time and circumstance. We further recognize that the current administration assumed office during one of these inevitable bust cycles that periodically afflict our chosen economic system. That said, we respond today with a citizen’s critique, a patriot’s critique, an optimist’s critique.
WAR
Today we engage ourselves in declared wars on multiple fronts against multiple foes; against terrorism and drugs and for oil. Today we engage ourselves in undeclared, indeed unspoken wars against healthcare, education and the environment. In view of the consequences of our stated positions on these three latter issues, it might appear to the jaundiced eye we are conducting a war against the future, yours, mine, ours and everyone’s.
Afghanistan has been the bone yard of empires for better than two thousand years. Are we to imagine that it will not be so in our case and on what grounds? Our great national mobilization against imminent threat?
DRUGS
While tacitly allowing poppy cultivation, eradicated by the Taliban, to flourish once again in Afghanistan, we condemn the free market economics in play throughout Central and South America as entrepreneurs seek to satisfy market demand on our part for their products. Our condemnation manifests in the form of enormous quantities of guns and money, sufficient to buy or intimidate national, sovereign governments. Is this a condition congruent with our perception of ourselves as a beacon to the world? Is this how we lift up our lamp?
OIL
What are we willing to sacrifice to be the last to suck up the last drop of the last dead dinosaur, our treasure, our youth, our environment, our role as inspiration to the world?
It’s a question that may well have been in some form posed by the man who cut down the last tree on Easter Island, but he’s not around to answer.