WTC redux
Dependence on the Middle East
(Submitted 15 Feb 2002 to the BDH)Mr Poole (``Government must fight wars for US oil interests'', 15 Feb) is Just Plain Wrong.
First of all, lack of oil and plastics would not send us back to "the Stone Age". At worst, we might say "19th century"; but even that is too sensationalistic, as we would still have all our power plants, and our transit systems are preparing to shift away from gasoline to hybrid and electric power anyway. We do use a fair amount of plastic, but you know what? Americans are pretty clever. Somehow, we'd manage. It's not like oil would disappear entirely, anyway; it would merely become more scarce, and therefore more expensive---where alternatives exist, we'd shift to them, but where oil and plastics are the only option, we'd suck it up and deal with it. Just because we like having cheap foreign oil does not license us to meddle repressively in foreign governments.
I would also like to address the two completely unrelated sentences, in which Mr Poole pins the WTC bombing on "religion". What is he thinking? Most religions that I'm aware of don't advocate terrorism, including Islam, and it is disingenuous at best to say a religion has "greed and ignorance". These are traits possessed by people, and however awful a person may be, that does not make eir religion bad. Not to mention that most Muslims were just as horrified as anyone else at the bombings, and indeed don't find any of the stated motivations of the Taliban to be at all consistent with their purported adherence to Islam.
Feel free to link to this essay, but do so at its original link: http://www.blahedo.org/essays/oil.html. Feel free to quote this essay in whole or in part, but please attribute it to me and (if on the web) link to the original.
Don Blaheta / web@blahedo.org
this space intentionally left blank