A crisis in thinking

I was listening today to the reports that gas prices have risen yet again, that the price of food, linked to the production and transportation of agricultural products, is likely to continue to rise. Families that used to live on $100 a week in grocery bills, are now finding that money being poured into their gas tanks, that luxuries like the price of air travel has been forever changed by the price of gas. The world is once again becoming a smaller, more expensive, and seemingly dangerous place to live.

The temptation, of course is to believe that this is just temporary, that we need to wait it out. That Congress or the President or the oil companies or opec, will just magically change their minds. Or that there is plenty of oil, and if we just find new places to dig, release new territories to be explored, that there will always be more. These are the comfortable lies we tell ourselves, and meanwhile families pour their grocery money, their savings and their future into a gas tank, to keep the economy running. The truth is, we must begin think about these problems in a new way or we will never generate a new reality; and, in the mean time, we are, in fact, destroying our current reality. 


There are those that will say that I am making all of this up, that the price of gas isn’t too high or that food isn’t that expensive. Neither the gas crisis nor the food crisis is the real problem. (The denial sets in, then the excuses.) The problem is the mortgage crisis, the economy, and the Bush presidency. The truth is none of these things are any more of less true, they are the altruisms that we use to make ourselves feel better, the economy will turn around, Bush will leave office, and thinking about it this way makes it better. Perhaps the real crisis is a thinking crisis. Instead of focusing on how to get cheaper gas, we must think about how to fuel our lives without gas. Instead of thinking about feeding the world today, we must figure out how to sustain a larger global population tomorrow.

We make our own reality; we live in a world of our own making. In order to change our thinking, we must begin to change our behavior. I don’t think myself into right action; I act myself into right thinking. I don’t even know what a better world of tomorrow will look like, but I suspect some of the basic luxuries of life will have to be reexamined. We must learn to value progress over convenience, life over lifestyle.

That is not an easy change, Especially when we are "Keeping up with the Joneses," the desire to be seen as being as good as one's neighbors accumulation of wealth and material goods... Perhaps our worldview needs to be a little broader. We must acknowledge that we are citizens of a global community, and realize that neither nature nor natural resources recognize our superficial political boundaries. (See my thoughts on sovereignty) Maybe then, through new action, can we avert the crisis of thinking.