Politics and a Sane Energy Policy

It saddens me when I hear someone say something like, “Oh, I’m not into politics.”   While I deeply sympathize with folks who are frustrated by government, I wonder if they know that the word “politics” derives from the Greek politikos, from politēs ‘citizen,’ from polis ‘city.’ It’s not really about government; it’s about our fellow human beings; it’s a concern all decent people share.

When he left office in 1960, Dwight Eisenhower left the people of the U.S. with a number of good pieces of advice, among which was this: “Americans need to consider politics as their part-time career.”  Of course, Ike (five-star General of the Army as of 1946), was referring principally to the dangers of the growing “military industrial complex” about which he warned us many times in his career, and the need for us Americans to do our best to make sure to slay this dragon while it was still a baby. But, famously, we did not, and now the subject has come to dominate our public discourse, as the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will come to top $4 trillion – an extraordinary sum of money that most of us believe could have been better spent elsewhere – perhaps in revising our approach to energy.

Be this as it may, those who say they don’t care about politics are really saying they don’t care about people – something they most obviously don’t mean.