Kunstler: What Reality Commands

From www.kunstler.com

If we resist doing what reality commands, our trouble is certain to be worse.

What does reality command?

Well, first of all (and especially for the benefit of the enviro-progressives I have met recently, who want gold medals for buying hybrid cars) we'd better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring.

The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished. We'd better find something else to talk about, or the American future will amount to little more than a colossal circle-jerk on an increasingly unfixable freeway.

I am hugely worried (obviously) that even the intelligent-and-educated fraction of our society cannot focus on anything but how to keep all the cars running. A failure to drop this, and move on to more practical endeavors, will lead automatically to a failure of reasonable politics in this country. It is already manifest in the abysmal failure of the Democratic candidates for president to address the looming oil import crisis that will certainly be underway as soon as any of them is inaugurated.

Reality commands that we prepare to rebuild our small towns and small cities and downsize our gigantic metroplexes. Reality commands that we get serious about local food production and local economies. Reality commands that we rebuild the kind of public transit that people will be grateful to travel on. Reality commands that we prepare to rebuild our harbor facilities for a revival of maritime trade, using ships and boats that do not necessarily run on oil. Reality commands that we put an end to legalized gambling, in order for the public to re-learn one of the primary rules of adult life -- that we generally should not expect to get something for nothing.

The trouble we are seeing in the financial sector is largely a result of blowback from tens of millions of people who tried to get something for nothing. It is a circumstance that is now beyond the control of the Bushes, Paulsons, and Bernankes. Their intended-to-be-soothing statements on Friday will not hold back the implosion of cascading defaults and cumulative insolvency. A few "poster children" may be symbolically rescued to try to prop up confidence in this-or-that paper, but an awful lot of other people and institutions will just go down, unfortunately, because of their own bad choices.

A strange new meta-reality will assert itself in America: that shit happens. We will see the ruined people and feel bad about them, but we will not be able to un-do the shit that has happened to them, that they have brought upon themselves. This is how the idea of moral hazard returns to a society that has lost its way.

Meanwhile, there is too much to do for the survivors to sit around wringing their hands and being crybabies. You can start by taking all the mental effort that you are currently wasting on the subject of cars, and how to run them on fuels other than gasoline, and instead focus your energy on how to rescue our political institutions so that a truly informed public can reconstruct a bankrupt society into a living and credible republic.