100 Crises, 100 Cars

The affect that President Obama projects is that none of the things CNN is shouting about are really crises--foreclosures, bank failures, type A H1N1 influenza, Chrysler's bankruptcy, GM's impending one, Iran, Iraq, the revival of the right wing in Israel, North Korea, and now he is faced with appointing a new member of the US Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.

That's why I do take the time to watch him when he goes on television, as I did Wednesday night, during his press conference.

We are in a crises, however, no matter how cool the president manages to appear. America, as Bill Clinton once said, manufactures houses and cars. Right now, America is doing neither. And to just ramp up production of these commodities by making credit more available will do nothing to end the serious threat of global warming.

So this confluence of crises might be one of those opportunities the Chinese speak about, but only if President Obama strongly steers us there: to restructure our economy to sustainability.

In 1974 we were suffering from inflation and a recession brought on by the oil embargo. I left New York and moved to San Francisco to start my career as a young lawyer. San Francisco's economy was robust because it was based on small businesses--restaurants that were adopting the Alice Waters' outlook of eating locally grown wholesome food, small law firms that had specialty niches (My firm only did plaintiffs' antitrust class action work. We were terrible at most everything else.) The Napa and Sonoma Valleys were being planted with vineyards and boutique wineries were blossoming. The first video rental stores soon sprouted up; there was no Blockbuster then. And of course, in garages all through the Silicon Valley, computer hardware, the Macintosh, and software were being developed by geeky guys.

Saving Chrysler and GM, and reviving the McMansions market, isn't the future for America. Will we be able to accept that? Our individual status has been linked to how much we consume for almost our entire history. It began before the Europeans arrived here. Where I live on Long Island, the Mattinicock tribes wore so many strands of wampum, early European explorers might have misstaken them for mollusks. Ostentation seems to be in the rich top soil that once supported the local farming that fed New York City.

Now mega-farms with cruel pens holding hundreds of thousands of animals, supply the dead carcasses that get quick frozen and shipped around the world. In those pens of hundreds of thousands of animals, weird viruses mutate, hence type A H1N1 influenza. Our acts have consequences.

We have to change, and what I so admire about our new president is that he is thoughtful, that he surrounds himself by very smart people, and as we learned from the debate about the release of the torture memos, he likes to listen to debate, but unlike Bill Clinton, he makes a timely decision after digesting the information.

My head aches just thinking about how much information he has to digest and how many decisions he has to make. But it isn't just him. As the myth of Obama fades a bit, as we see through our own illusions, it's time for us to engage so that our democracy is fueled by an informed and articulate electorate. We can do it.