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Wind Turbines and Faces on the Horizon


The days of the coal-powered flashlight are over.
It seems inevitable that small storage batteries will replace
the furnace-powered backpacks and head lamps.

A Bloomberg report suggests that while coal powered economies
will still be aggressive for another decade or so,
that within twenty years alternative energies will drive our economies.

And therein lies what everybody really knows
and does not want to admit:
the old industrial revolution, powered by coal and steam
and gas and diesel oil, is gagging on its own emissions.

Mari and I recently drove from Tucson to the Upper Midwest
to attend Spencer's graduation, and to see grand friends.
The number of wind turbines lacing the skylines and ridges was astounding.
Iowa, where Mari was born, where she rode a pony to a tiny wooden schoolhouse--
evidence that even the industrial revolution was not so long-ago aborning--
is no longer just diesel tractor and corn- and beanland.

It is wind turbine territory,
and even what is still diesel fueled is computer calculated
and information driven; it is not just local Midwest:
it is part of a world market,
even if it thinks of itself as the heart of family farming.

It is not so much that our political system is failing us:
it is that our political system almost stubbornly refuses to admit
that the age of coal mining and fossil fuels and cast iron jobs is almost gone.

Our whole economic foundation is shifting,
and we act as if two hundred years of throwing our refuse into the river
and blowing the exhaust downwind was going to make it go away.
It doesn't go away:  it comes around from the other side
and makes the kids sick, and causes cancer and black lung disease.
The atmosphere is heating up, and the ice is melting.

I remember myself sitting on the third-floor window ledge
of our tired old apartment building in Chicago,
with a hose hauled up through a basement window,
trying with warm water and a steel wool pad
to scrape black coal soot from the acid-pitted window panes
so that we could see what was out there.

But we stoutly resist admitting to ourselves
that the whole foundation to our precarious middle class
was built on the foundation of an industrial civilization,
and that everything is fundamentally changing.

It is inane, it is ignorant, it is perverse to pretend
that we can still ride our ponies to little wooden schoolhouses,
and burn coal, and build wooden bridges to our markets.

Both political parties are doing just what most voters are doing:
more of the same, even though the same old stuff is what is making us gag.
It isn't that the Democrats are right and the Republicans are wrong, or visa versa.
It is that they are both wrong because they have not seen that the ice is melting,
that the air is gray, and that the water is rising.

They have not seen that the old jobs are dwindling,
and that new skills and possibilities are rising;
that everything is shifting, including what we used to think of each other
as men and women, families, the fiction of multiple human races,
and how we do our work, how we depend on each other,
and what we think a nation is:  the faces on the horizon are ours.



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