Eyes on the Prize

This AP story is yet one more alarm bell about the fire that is starting to take down rooms in our planetary house. The sign of a serious people, a serious democracy is surely the ability to recognize such species-threatening activity and to undergo the serious discussion and programming necessary to cope with it. We, all of us, Dems and Repubs and Indies, blogs and MSM, are instead talking about gay marriage and Lieberman and throwing our resources and energies away on Iraq and toothpaste tubes. They should be the secondary themes to an agenda of uniting the country, the world in stopping the progress of this escalating tragedy (in the true sense of tragic).

And please don't tell me that the first priority is electing a Dem Congress or house and then we'll start talking seriously about doing something, baby steps or first steps or all that. Al Gore is the only Dem with the courage and common sense about the issue of our times, which, if Congressional Dems had any clue, would be the drum it home point of the whole election. Terrorism scares people into voting Repub? How about dead oceans, hurricanes, and The Long Emergency? A party that cannot see that by this time cannot be expected to confront it well, any more than blogs that ignore it can. (And a serious party (or blog) makes an issue of the demonstrated unreliability of the existing election technology so it's not reliant on the other side for the results it claims are most important.)

I know I'm shouting against a giant inertial, self-referential wind here (which is why I don't blog much on politics anymore), but nothing we say we want on the progressive side happens in a future dominated by failures to deal well with our non-linearly changing weather, water, and energy. The feedback loops are already kicking in and the dead patches are literally forming. There's no democracy under scarcity, rationing, and triage, and the only equality isn't a happy kind. History will not treat well people who see defeating Lieberman (if we do) or stopping some gay marriage amendments (if we do) as the biggest things we can get done at this point in ours, especially when they naturally happen anyway if we are effective in getting everyone's eyes focused on the prize.

Yes, I'm old and grumpy. That means I'm wise.

UPDATE: Yet another nail.