"The U.S. military's insatiable thirst for oil isn't exactly news." Aaron

I think the US public is complicit in this. This is not a negative, because that mean we can change it. We can't split up issues into parts. It's the attitude of Americans and their addiction to consumption that has led to this problem. The government works for us. We have to decide that we don't want to do this anymore.

We have to decide that we don't want to just mindlessly spend money, drive our cars and passively support the killing of people so we can continue to do this just so that we can have an "easy" life. And how easy is it?

To me the consumer attitude of the American public is like that of a person addicted to fastfood or heroin, it seems easier until it kills you (or even worse doesn't kill you, but just makes you extremely sick and powerless) and you don't even remember how to grow and make your own food anymore, you don't know how to be normal anymore and then your beholden to some corporate machine in order to just be baseline.

Is that what we want, to just be baseline. That seems to me to bring nothing but sadness.

The economy doing badly has hurt my little toe, but not nearly as much as my associates who drive cars, who buy new clothes on credit cards, who only find value in life from the items that they own. It seems to me we should just stop and reevaluate what is important and what is not important. I think the planet is important, people are important, trees are important, water is important and none of those things have anything to do with my credit rating or going to some store and buying something or mortgaging my house and working JUST to pay for a bunch of crap that really if you just think a little bit, you don't even need.

Browne