Apocalypse Now!

I wonder if we live in the pre-apocalyptic era.

The jobs are bleeding away, housing marketing is crushing down, glaciers are melting away and the oil is gushing into the ocean.

The over-population and irresponsible behavior of human kind, particularly the consumerism of American brand, are making the earth unsustainable.

Bob Herbert had a just published an interesting article Our Epic Foolishness. He said:

If a bank is too big to [let] fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.

When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast.

BP and the Obama administration have been equally clueless about halting the millions of gallons of oil that have flowed into the gulf since the Deepwater Horizon explosion more than a month ago. President Obama's top adviser on energy policy, Carol Browner, unintentionally underscored the monumental futility of the response in a comment she made on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday.

'This is obviously a difficult situation,' said Ms. Browner, 'but it's important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.'

...

We see it in the shrinking middle class and in the black community where depressionlike conditions are fostering not just a sense of helplessness, but despair.

What's needed is dynamic leadership (it doesn’t have to come from the top) to reinvigorate the spirit of America and turn that sense of helplessness around.

Yes, indeed. We need it now. Otherwise, this will be Apocalypse Now!