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Power shift
Power shiftWe didn't set out to write a green edition of the paper this week, though you wouldn't know it from the look of the final product.
Gov. Tim Kaine is on page A-1, touting Barack Obama's energy and environmental credentials. Warrenton Mayor George Fitch also has a slot on the front page, reviewing Lance Albaugh's exhaustive analysis of Warrenton's carbon footprint. Reporter Alex Bogdanovic has an interview with Deborah Williamson, a resident of Catlett who has started a local chapter of Green Drinks, a social, networking and environmental problem-solving group, and the main business story this week profiles Golden Rule Builders, which continues to refine the the definition of residential green building.
Something's going 'round, and it appears to be infectious.
And we're beginning to get the sense that the 'bug' goes far beyond the environment, and that green — the commingled concerns with the environment, energy and global warming — is just the easiest thing on which to grab.
Surveys vary by a point or two here and there, but an overwhelming majority of us have told Gallop and Zagat and the other pollsters that the United States has lost its way.
If we really are interested in finding our way back, it's time for a change, and that is not meant as a political endorsement. Indeed, this newspaper endorsed John McCain very early this year.
We are fairly certain that, Republican or Democrat, reversing course from the most damaging, ill-conceived and anti-American directions into which we have wandered will be one of the new president's initial tasks.
Backing away from wiretapping all our phones, for instance — maybe even putting judicial review squarely back in the mix.
Maybe giving some thought to shutting down Guantanamo Bay and ending the most despicable chapter in American history.
Perhaps even taking a serious look at why our answer to troubled neighborhoods — one, even, in Washington — is to put up roadblocks and trample on the Constitution on a daily basis and as a matter of routine; at how and why the economic divide has grown to chasmic proportions, with no sign of abating; at how and why the middle class is disappearing, the American Dream evaporating.
While he's at it, maybe President McCain or President Obama will try to do something helpful for the increasing millions without health insurance, the growing number without food security, and the swelling ranks of the unemployed, those who have lost their homes and the millions whose golden years have taken on tarnish.
A tall order, but the new president will take all this on because we will make him.
And it all starts with green.
Voters in Colorado got sick and tired of waiting for their elected officials to do something about energy and global warming, The Washington Post reported in a story this week, so they put a green initiative on the ballot. It passed, over the strenuous lobbying of the oil and gas companies. The world as we know it did not come to an end.
That's a heady victory, and others are likely to follow.
"It was one of those cases where the public was ahead of the politicians," according to an energy strategist quoted in the story.
The public, as evidenced by the green tint to this week's Times-Democrat, is way ahead of the politicians on environmental issues.
We are ahead of our elected officials on the other issues, as well. If we weren't, fewer of us would tell the poll takers that we have lost our way, floundering in the darkness.
We're ahead of the politicians because we want to find our way back, and they, apparently, either don't or can't figure out how.
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