The Hope Heard Round The World

If you want the dream to continue, change must begin with you, not Obama. He is a blank slate on which much will be written. As of now, those with the pens are the same old crowd.

I refer in particular to the Bloomberg story on Obama's ongoing support for corn based ethanol. It is exactly what you would expect from a cautious, one step at a time politician from the 2nd largest corn producing state whose campaign CoChair, Tom Daschle, is on the boards of 3 ethanol companies, two of which are in bankruptcy.

While I am critical of this position, my point is really that we have to continue pushing for the changes that we want, or we will get those we don't want.

Exactly.

"This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.."

- Barack Obama, November 4, 2008

With the election of Barack Obama, a new day is surely dawning for the family of humanity. We have good reasons to be hopeful. The agonizing throes of the severe and colossal storm we have endured in the past several years have produced an unexpected outcome. The air is being cleansed and the dark clouds that had been gathering on the horizon are being blown away.

Al Gore has reminded all of us that now is the time for intellectual honesty and moral courage as necessary attributes for responding ably to the human-driven global challenges which are looming ominously before humankind. As the horrendous, once in a century storm is being swept away by benevolent winds of change, perhaps we will see that honest and courageous activities of many people will begin to replace cascading, self-interested behavior of a few misguided, greedy people who have been willing to do whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially fashionable... come what may for our children.

Perhaps sufficiently reality-oriented changes in policymaking and action planning, changes that protect biodiversity from mass extinction, prevent more wanton environmental degradation and preserve Earth's body from relentless dissipation as well as the children from endangerment, are in the offing.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

On the matter of bankrupting the human family's global economy.

It appears intellectual dishonesty is but one of the perverse ways in which old, out of touch leaders in my not-so-great generation are bankrupting the family of humanity.

Please note the way ideologically-driven leadership is providing ample evidence of being morally bankrupt and spiritually vacuous.

Unbridled greed and institutionalized fraud by mortgagors of our childrens' future are leading to decay within the financial system and threatening to ruin the real global economy.

Many too many economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians are besmirching our honor and degrading the value of rational authority.

As I recall the course of human events, never in history have a few million stupendously rich people but otherwise bankrupt people stolen, consumed and hoarded so much of Earth's resource base, come what may for billions of other people in the human family who happen to be less fortunate. That a tiny minority of rich and powerful people have been so unfairly and inequitably rewarded by an economic scheme favoring their wanton avarice, is no longer a set of circumstances which can be concealed by the refusals of the mainstream media to bring up this situation for open discussion..... or by our collusive silence.

Thankfully, a new day is dawning.