Whose Reality Is It , Anyway?

There are multiple realities, a common experience, especially after eight years of Bush where the rich lived one kind of life, ordinary working people another, and the media projected something entirely different.

I heard one "ordinary" person interviewed on NPR express relief that we finally had a State of the Union-type address without any mention of 911.

That creeps out Fox News, but somehow allows the rest of us to wonder which is more devastating to us personally and as a people: losing our jobs, home, health care, and our children's futures or living in a constant state of "orange" over inflated threats of terrorism?

After eight years we have grown accustomed to fearing those darkish men with Middle Eastern accents. On the first flight I took after 911, two South Asian men, both exceptionally well dressed, who along with me were flying from JFK to San Francisco on an early Saturday morning (not exactly prior time for a media event) were taken out of the waiting room, not once, but twice before boarding. Shame and embarrassment were what I read on their faces.

It's easier for white people to choose dark skinned people as the enemy, so long as you aren't one of them.

But the real enemies are white guys in suits: bankers, lawyers, mortgage executives, guys with MBAs from Harvard, Wharton, and Yale, the clever folks who created new ways to make money, created new property to own. The insecurity and devastation that the alleged "best and brightest" have brought us is far more undermining than most of what Jack Bauer might be imagining.

That's why we need regulation, and the only entity large enough to regulate is the federal government. So, shut up, Republicans. When money is at stake, greed and avarice appear. Then there is no such thing as self-regulation.

Did You Say Regulation? You Don't Know From Regulation!

Every time I hear McCain or Palin putting down regulation as the cause of every working person's agony, like yours, Joe the Plumber, I think about: child labor laws, safer workplaces, anti-discrimination laws, minimum wage and maximum hours.

What's so wrong about those laws? They made every working person's life better.

As I mentioned before, I am reading Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." During the eight years of Bush denial that global warming began with the industrial revolution when humans increased our burning of carbon-based fuels, (and not welcomed evidence of the "end of days"), we lost our leadership position to turn the coming environmental disaster around.

Al Gore tried to get our attention, but he was demonized by Republicans, and the entire subject of global warming became a political issue instead of a scientific one.

As the world's biggest consumer, we could have signed the Kyoto Protocols, voluntarily cut our own emissions, jump started some new green technologies, stopped producing SUVs and start building hybrids (instead of killing the electric car), thereby avoiding the export of all our money to the Middle East, especially to Saudi Arabia, that uses our money to keep women veiled, literally, and to export its weird and anti-modernistic brand of desert Islam throughout the Middle East and beyond so that there are more and more radical Islamists to hate us.

There once was a time when most Muslims were moderate, they ate dinner with their families at the same table, and their wives, daughters, and sisters were not forced to cover themselves, be escorted by male family members, and when they were free to go to school and work.

Unless we do something to reverse global warming, and this aggravates me about this presidential campaign, because no one is talking about it, we will be living in a very, very regulated state, the real scary kind that prevents riots, because of scarcity, famine, lack of fresh drinking water, and massive dislocation.

Global warming happens exponentially and faster than anticipated by scientists.

Like what we are seeing now in parts of Africa.

So let's understand that we are running out of time. America has to take a leadership role as the world's biggest consumer of everything, or else we will be the cause of the planet's demise.