Common Sense

[Lydia Leftcoast]

...I was stuck in rush-hour traffic in Interstate 5 in Seattle. It was a blistering summer day, hot and so bright it almost hurt your eyes. I was sweating in six lanes of stop and go traffic (mostly stop), and suddenly I had an external viewpoint on this most mundane of American experiences....

Here I was, sitting in several thousand dollars worth of industrial machinery that had been extracted, manufactured, transported, and purchased at great expense--monetary and environmental--every step along the way. I was sitting in this machine, burning fossil hydrocarbons that had also been extracted, transported, processed, and purchased at great expense--monetary and environmental--every step of the way. I was on this federal highway system, the materials for which had likewise been extracted, transported, constructed, and purchased at great expense--monetary and environmental--every step of the way.

And I was going nowhere. The only thing I was accomplishing was polluting the air and losing my patience.

Worse, I was surrounded by tens of thousands of others who were in similar machinery, burning the same expensive, irreplaceable fossil hydrocarbons, polluting the same air, and also going nowhere...



http://bicyclefixation.com/commonsense.html
---------------------------

[stellanoir]

1. "Common Sense". . .

or is it consensual collective lack thereof. . .?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. It's the Nation of Sheep phenomenon

If something is relentlessly promoted on TV (cars, suburban housing developments, prescription drugs, Republican ideology), it's got to be A Good Thing, right? :sarcasm:

Tom Toles had a great cartoon once nearly twenty years ago. It showed a freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic, factories spewing black smoke, and a riverbed full of trash and fish skeletons. The speech balloon coming out of one of the stalled cars said, "Environmentalists just want to destroy our quality of life."

[stellanoir]

3. Yeah and it's only gotten weirder since then.

I can't recall where or specifically when I heard this but was definitely over the last year or so. I sometimes listen to 3 radio stations at once and then wonder why I'm confused. :silly:

Someone exposed the fallacy of the antiquated perspective of liberal tree huggers being at odds with RW NRA types, when hunters generally love the outdoors and want to see it preserved and the wildlife be sustained, or they'll lose their favorite hobby.

I'll always believe there is far more that unites the overwhelming majority of us globally than the intractable dualism that is continually and relentlessly foisted upon us.

"Divide & Conquer" is such a tiresomely predictable yawn fest.

Yikes.