food for thought.

As someone who tries to moderately keep informed of current affairs on a global perspective, I find myself often times as the "Debbie Downer" in groups of friends when hot topics come up such as any one of the African states in crisis, the war on terror, global warming, immigration, etc. I find myself in this position because most argue a) without knowing the complete story, only what has been fed from usually a single source and b) without taking into consideration circumstances beyond the seemingly "narrow" topic of interest.

The truth is that our world is ever more inter-connected than ever before and it increases exponentially everyday. Just for example, the conflict in Darfur is largely managed by the President of China, Hu Jintao whose country is largely choking on its own twofold growth, its extreme pollution and skyrocketing economy. The United States borrows billions of dollars from China largely to finance the war on terror, and therefore takes no action against them on either front, Darfur or global warming, other than mild lipservice. This is just a minuscule example of how nothing is "single-issue" anymore. But getting to point of this post, there was an interesting article titled, "5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit" from the Washington Post this morning that I feel illustrates this point very clearly. And just a disclaimer, while I realize that solutions are very complex and encompass much more than meets the eye, I do not subscribe to the school of thought that we should just be apathetic, quite the opposite actually. I hope you find this enlightening.