Green Rant

With gas prices now topping out over $4/gallon, and food prices soaring ever higher, families are feeling the pinch now more than ever before.  Add to the mix the housing crisis, and you have a lot of people learning the hard way how to live with less.  And it is a terrible thing that people are losing their homes.  It is also terrible that unemployment and homelessness is on the rise. People have to choose between eating and filling up their car with gasoline.  But we brought this mess upon ourselves.  We learned nothing from the oil crisis of the 1970's.  As soon as the oil started flowing cheaply again, people chose to forget about the fact that petroleum is a non-renewable resource.  It is not in unlimited supply.  So people bought their SUVs, and they moved to the suburbs where they could have a giant house with a giant yard.  And they filled their McMansions with mounds of stuff.  

Then the bills came due.  The credit card bills, and the mortgage, and the car payment and most important of all, the environmental cost of all that greed and waste is coming due.  And the human cost. While the middle class was busy stuffing its face with cake, the rich ran off with all of the real money and the government in their pocket. So now the environment is in shambles and the rich don't care because they have raped and pillaged and gotten what they needed out of the Earth, and they can afford to buy gas and food and pay their mortgage.  With the middle class becoming more and more the lower class, the rich are going to have everything.  The lower class is going to have no choice but to be slaves for the upper class.  

There are 10.1 million people worldwide with at least $1 million in assets as of 2007.  They have a combined wealth of $40.7 trillion.  It is expected to be around $59.1 trillion by 2012. They represent a mere 0.15% of the world's 6.7 billion people.  33% of these millionaires live in the United States.  

What kind of a world do we live in where a few people have everything and billions of people are living in the depths of poverty and despair?  Sometimes I wonder why humans are so selfish and soul-less.  We are neglecting our fellow human beings, and we are letting the Earth fall apart right before our eyes, and we could have done something about it, but it was too much trouble.  It would have put a cramp in our consumerist, greedy, self-righteous lifestyles.