Super-Sized Request

The other day, I was watching a feature on CNN featuring their ace international correspondent Christiane Amanpour. She visited North Korea extensively, even touring one of their controversial nuclear facilities. In the middle of the report, pictures of starving North Korean children from the terrible famine there a few years ago were shown. And then they broke for a commercial. Which showed a young woman preparing a exquisite, mouth-watering plateful of food in her own home. She then put it down for her fluffy white cat, it being gourmet cat food! It was a perfect picture to me of the incredibly insulated state that so many of us here in America live in.

Of course, since the recovery from the Great Depression, concern about where the next meal is coming from is not prevalent among the vast majority of Americans (although there are pockets of very, very poor, malnourished people, to be sure). In fact, the prevailing problem with food here is the high level of obesity, especially among the low-income population. With many, food is not just a source of nutrition or even a pleasant treat: it is a salve that they can pop into their mouth (like a baby with its pacifier) to relieve emotional stress.

We Americans feel so aggrieved at the way the fuel costs here are skyrocketing. But even with all of the negative economic factors considered, including the sinking value of the dollar, prosperous West European countries are paying twice the rate for their gas as we are! It is only in those oil-producing nations whose governments exert control over their oil and its distribution that gas prices are cheap (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait). Our problem here is that we’ve done very little since the wake-up call induced by the Arab Oil Embargo of the early seventies to make our machines either use oil more efficiently or use other sources of energy.

The big growth industry in the U.S. is without a doubt entertainment. And why is that? Because so many people here have so much free time to do what they want and money to spend on it! How can people go around complaining like they do about the terrible economy while expending this amount of effort amusing themselves? Because at heart, some of us are spoiled rotten children! And now we’re really ticked off because the rest of the world would like to make a little request to us: can we just cut back a little from the over-consumption and hedonism, just a little to save the planet from overheating? Pretty-please with a cherry on top (don‘t forget to super-size it)?!