Blurry

After writing my first post, I wanted to add what I thought was a silver lining to our self-destructive tendency to abandon long-term adherence to our principles in favor of short-term expediency:

There's a limit, and it's lower than I expected.  The line between idealism and practicality becomes blurry.

When gas prices in the U.S. topped $4/gallon last year, there was serious talk about alternative energy.  SUV sales plummeted, and dealerships couldn't keep hybrids in stock.  Similarly, this financial meltdown has inspired a populist uprising against the disparity of wealth bigger than anything I can remember seeing in my lifetime.

My dim view of human nature told me that we wouldn't even begin to think about changing our ways until we were on the actual brink of collapse.  As horrible as the things I mentioned were, they weren't even close to that.  So, there's some reason to hope.

Now the problem becomes one of bringing the important issues to the public's attention in a way that affects them directly.  How does one do that with the national debt, when the consequences are subtle and largely applied to future generations?  How does one do that with the war on drugs, where it's easy to dismiss the victims as "those junkies?"

Still, there's reason to hope that we don't have to take ourselves to the absolute edge of catastrophe before we begin to wise up.