My father was career military. I grew up with the pledge of allegiance in school in the morning. I gave up a college deferment to join the army during the Korean War. I spent most of my foreign service career fighting communism. I do not believe that we should decide to try to change our sex, because we are unhappy with our emotions. I feel perfectly comfortable defecating in just about any bathroom I can imagine - no matter the sign on the door, and I can definitely pee in back of the barn. I am uncouth and out of touch with American society today. You have to understand that I understand that fact of life.
The man that I voted for in the last election has just been declared to be a convicted felon through the application of law-fare, and the msn that he is replacing got surprisingly wealthy, allegedly on a government salary. I look around me and I see a government in disarray and a society that is coming unglued at the seams. It depresses me, particularly because I feel helpless to do anything about it. Society frowns on me because I fail to toe the current line. People refuse to hear me - or anyone else that speaks honestly to substance, for that matter. We are firmly siloed into our own fantasies and refuse to hear anything inconsistent with our personal fairy tale. National decisions are not made by an informed public, they are made by shifting partisan majorities and they only last a couple of years, at best - no matter what they are, because none of them are well thought out and the great unwashed public, that periodically gives them validity, is mindless.
Los Angeles is burning and you and I are looking for ways to ensure that the blame falls on the other. I hold that it is well past time to think about water more broadly. Turkey is controlling the headwaters of the Euphrates and Ethiopia and China are both already changing the way water flows. Both the Nile and the Mekong will never be the same again. We have done the same with water from the Colorado all through the West and it is well past time to update and extend, repeat extend, our systems. The basic problem is the mass of humanity demanding that water, but there are also severe distribution imbalances that must be addressed - not just for fire suppression, but literally for everything else, including basic food production. What is happening to Los Angeles can happen to any of us and so can the malnutrition that is rampant in the Sahel.
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