A war with no winners

Isn't it enough that we've politicized the present? Why must we also politicize the future?

The current election has been fraught with fearful claims about the fate of our grandchildren if we continue to bury them in debt. Well, what about if we bury them in the depths of our own inability to be responsible stewards of this planet?

It is not only disingenuous but also hyper-hypocritical to fret over the fact that babies are being born in debt rather than in danger. That's right, danger. In our selfish attempts to get people elected and pocketbooks filled, to bring down gas prices and lift the value of our homes, and to maintain our creature comforts at the expense of Earth's other creatures, we shamelessly delude ourselves into believing that monetary issues are more important to the children of tomorrow than environmental issues. Yet anyone with a brain knows that babies need air and water far more than they need a balanced budget.

Why is it, then, that environmental concerns are almost always trumped by monetary ones? And not only trumped but actually attacked as costly and crazy and even the cause of current fiscal fiascoes. Why does the picture of a future with children financially under water bother us more than the picture of a future with children literally under water?

In all the election rhetoric we have endured it would have been refreshing to hear as a response to the emotional political wailing about our children's futures a candidate asking with simple logic, "Would you rather your offspring struggle to breathe or to balance the budget?"

That question does not dismiss our duties to do something about our debt; it simply prioritizes our politics. The same blind greed that got us into this monetary mess also got us into the environmental mess that we keep refusing to see even as the evidence of mankind's long and continued environmental abuses grows. But the promise of good cash flow in the here-and-now garners far more votes than the promise of clean-flowing streams in the future.

Because realization is far more politically inconvenient than rationalization, we have reached a ridiculous point where certain TV commercials actually have officials thanking BP for the fine work done in the tourism industry of the Gulf States. We continue to tout as a cheap and safe source of energy the nuclear plants that create deadly waste that will not be cheap and safe for those who have to deal with it for centuries in the future. And for the jobs of today, many of which scar and pollute the world of tomorrow, we are willing to sacrifice the safety of our progeny for political gain, because thinking ecologically appears to be far less practical in politics than thinking economically.

It is that type of polarized paradigm, that stubborn adherence to the idea that capitalism and conservation cannot constructively co-exist, that threatens the children of the future far more than debt. The same political pursuits that have pushed us into expensive and unnecessary wars have also pushed us into decisions that pit the environment against the economy, and those are battles the environment loses almost every time.

When will we finally open our eyes and minds to see that our children and our children's children will be the ultimate losers of that war? I want my grandchildren to breathe clean air and drink clean water and enjoy a world where natural beauty abounds, and I would like them to be able to live in that world free of the burdensome debt acquired by my avaricious generation, but it seems clear that such a debt could be considerably relieved by profits generated today if we would attempt to provide a clean world for tomorrow. Jobs and profit and debt reduction could occur along with clean-up efforts if our leaders would quit jumping on the political bandwagon that is overloaded with complaints about the inhibiting economic factors of environmental regulations and simply start making money by making the world a better place.

We could achieve both debt relief and a safer environment if we could push politics aside and admit that both debt and pollution are manmade problems that require manmade solutions. At this point we have been unable to do that and have merely learned to live with both problems, but at some point in the near future we will also have to learn to live with the fact that, politically unpopular as the truth may be, one problem will be troublesome for our offspring while the other will be deadly.

Mike Ruskovich is a Blanchard resident.