Sanity Check (from the archives)

Every once in a while, I come across something so completely stupid that I just can't let it go without saying something. Today, while signing out of my old-school hotmail account, I noticed a headline on MSN.com (the default site where you get dumped when you sign out) that proclaimed, in scary red font: "The Middle Class Crunch." Below were a bunch of equally dire sub-titles: "How to Fix: Fill in the Blank Perceived Problem With Our Country." Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on "How to Fix: America's Energy Woes." Here's the opening paragraph:

"Everybody says this country needs a Sputnik-style challenge to get us motivated again. But Americans already face such a challenge in climate change and an energy crunch - and they threaten us far more dramatically than the Soviet space program ever did."

First of all, everybody says that? I don't. Nor have I heard anyone ever say anything so stupid (until today). When trotting out an argument espousing fundamental policy changes, it's always good to start with an erroneous, meaningless statement.

But the next sentence is even better. The "energy crunch" and global warming pose a greater danger to our country than the Sputnik space program that led directly to the nuclear arms race, when thousands of Soviet ICBMs were targeted on our cities and school children practiced duck-and-cover drills to prepare for nuclear holocaust? Just how in the name of bugger-all could anyone possibly say something so ignorant? I'm literally angry just thinking about the magnitude of stupidity and generational egoism on display here. "Oh no, poor us! Gas costs four dollars a gallon and ice is melting! We have things so much tougher than anyone before us ever did! My latte has too much foam! Wahhhhhhhhhhh!!!"

If the people reading this nonsense would ever bother to crack a history book, they'd quickly realize just how good life is today, and how much worse it used to be. Not to say that everything today is perfect, but considering that 40 years ago, we were literally afraid of being vaporized within minutes, four-dollar gas and global warming sound like manageable challenges.