Watonga is a small town about an hour or so to the northwest of Oklahoma City. The citizens of Watonga aren’t used having much drama. This morning, however, the drama is high. The residents of Watonga didn’t get much sleep last night, because, at about 10:30 PM, an oil drilling rig just outside of town exploded, with flames shooting 100 feet in the air.
Republican presidential candidates say that they’d like to see drilling for oil and natural gas all across the United States. Let them have their way, and you could wake up in the middle of the night to explosions and fires raging out of control, just like they did in Watonga last night.
Once again, the illusion of safe oil drilling has gone up in flames.
This isn’t any reason for hope or change:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/20/323324/september-20-news-obamas-climate-envoy-casts-doubt-on-kyoto-protocol/
On darker days I think this country will have to be a smoldering ruin before the people wake up and realize we need to take care of things or we’ll lose them. By then, of course, it will be too late.
You look in the past and wonder why great societies fall. There are concrete reasons why nation states eventually yield to the barbarians. Usually it’s a mixture of greed and insane ideology. We’ve got that in spades.