A New President - But The Power Is Still With The People

"And a merchant said,
Speak to us of Buying and Selling,
And he answered and said:
To you the earth yields her fruit,and you shall not want
if you but know how to fill your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that
you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice,
it will lead some to greed and others to hunger."
-- Kahlil Gibran from "The Prophet"

It is wonderful news that Barak Obama will soon be in the White House. I wept, too, last night during his acceptance speech, but not for the same reasons as most others. I wept because I am not sure it is going to make any difference.

I don't mean to be cynical. It is just that I have a list of planetary priorities, no part of which was ever mentioned in any debate or speech by the major party's candidates. Here is my list for the United States that no president will EVER address as long as his/her job description includes caring for the U.S. economic system:

• Stop throwing out 200,000 tons of edible food every day


• Stop using use 313 million gallons of fuel - enough to drain 26 tractor -trailer trucks every minute


• Stop allowing cigarettes to be made, which kills 1,233 people in the U.S. alone every day


• Stop taking 18 million tons of raw materials from the Earth every day


• Stop using 6.8 billion gallons of fresh drinking water to flush toilets every day


• Stop people from throwing over 1 million bushels of litter out of car windows every day


• Stop people from adding 10,000 mink coats to their closets and coat racks every day


• Stop the $200 million spent every day on advertising in the U.S. alone


• Stop sawing up 100 million board feet of wood a day


• Stop using 250,000 tons of steel every day


• Stop using 187,000 tons of paper every day

And my global list is even more chilling:

• Stop 120,000 children worldwide from dying each day from diarrhea from polluted drinking water.


• Stop pesticide poisoning, which kills over 265,000 people worldwide every year


• Stop 180 sq. miles of tropical forests from being cleared every day


• Stop 73 tons of topsoil from being eroded every day


• Stop eliminating 10 to 100 species every day


• Stop the 78 million tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that is emitted every day


• Stop the 1,800 tons of ozone-depleting chloroflorocarbons that are added to the atmosphere every day.
  

No president has or ever will address these issues without a fundamental restructuring of their job. As long as they are tasked with keeping the U.S. economy going as currently designed, these will continue to be the consequences of doing business to support that system.

People have to understand that the true power lies with us and our choices - food choices, transportation choices, purchasing choices. No matter who sits in the White House, we can change the world tomorrow - if we wanted to.