Amusing Moment at the Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency
Maybe “you had to be there” for this one, but I was personally amused by the following dialog in which a presenter at this year’s Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency fielded a question from an audience member:
Audience member: It’s clear that we need to build out our grid, in a way not too different from what we did in the 1950s with the national highway system. Why can’t we do that?
Presenter: Oh, that would require help and guidance from the federal government.
Now, if you didn’t chuckle, maybe the story is too sad to be funny. Of course we need federal help in executing a project that involves every one of the 50 states. That’s what the federal government does. But apparently, we’ve gotten to the point that this is really out of the question, and all we can expect of Washington is partisan bickering and political posturing.
And that is sad indeed; I’ll understand if you’re not snorting with laughter.
I’m certain that there are significant numbers of those nearest the top who would have liked to whisper in good ole Doc Kissy’s ear, ‘Psst, shut your trap, Henry, we don’t want them all to remember that.’
The great Frederick Douglass observed the same phenomenon in 1857, when the abolition of slavery was a mere glimmer of hope in a tiny minority of Americans, “Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Similarly, the concept was illustrated in a thinly veiled manner in the Pixar animated feature “A Bugs Life” where the villain, Hopper, puts his position forward succinctly, “You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and, if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It’s not about food, it’s about keeping those ants in line.”
Get in line, ant, go back to sleep.