Crazy

I liked Jim Kunstler's Dec. 24, 2007, blog entry, A Christmas Eve Story, here, where an old friend had told him, "You know, you've been predicting all these catastrophes for years now, but we're still here, the cars are all rolling down Broadway out there, and life is going on. You're beginning to sound like a crazy person." Kunstler's reaction, "It didn't bother me especially that G thought my my ideas were outlandish so much as being comprehensively written off by an old friend as a crazy person, someone who... I dunno... rummages through dumpsters and talks to himself on the street without any sign of a cell phone in hand."
I related because I remember calling up an old friend a couple years ago when the peak oil demon first possessed me. It took me a while to assure M that I wasn't selling anything, that I just called to pass the word that there was a dark line on the horizon that might develop into a major storm in the next few years. He said I sounded like an alarmist. I had to admit that yeah, I was kind of sounding an alarm. I gave him a few web sites to check out and hung up. It kind of bothered me because, being psychic, I could picture him picturing me on the other end of the line, wearing a tinfoil hat and rolling a pair of large ball bearings around in my hand.
Its not easy being a prophet in your own land. Especially when you're not even a prophet, just a guy who happens onto writings and research reports bearing on our economy, civilization and world that bear a second, third and more look, and passes the word on. Kunstler is not a scientist, he's a writer, a reporter. But he is a hell of a good writer and a hell of a good reporter. And he is not bad as a prognosticator either, having foreseen the housing meltdown several years back.
It is puzzling to me that so many Americans, or at least so many Republicans who call themselves Americans can fully support plunging a coerced coalition of nations into two wars, spending billions upon billions upon billions of dollars and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives in an effort to thwart a handful of scruffy religious fanatics who might be plotting to swim across the Atlantic Ocean and blow up an appliance store in Newark, yet indignantly oppose as liberal (they really need that liberal label) hysteria a great body of sober, credible scientific literature warning of imminent geological developments that will make concern about those scruffy fanatics fade into utter insignificance.
But I understand the fear of crazy people and alarmists. It's natural. I remember reading a letter in a newsblog from a reader who complained about the peak oil/global warming types who said things that frankly scared him and suggested that they could be so much more effective if they would just stop upsetting people. Indeed. Hush little baby, don't you cry, momma's gonna sing you a lullaby....