It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

I would like to start off by giving a shout out to The History Channel.

Thanks. You turned my parents to in nut cases totally obsessed with the coming rapture. Somewhere between "Life After People", "Nostradamus", "Mega Disasters", and "Signs of the Apocalypse" you got my parents hook line and sinker that the end is near.

I get that the ratings are probably pretty good for those shows and that they are easy and cheap to make. (All you need is an "expert" that will talk on camera about the science behind a theoretical event and BAM!! you got a show.) However, why do you have to put so much of that on. It's not even history, it hasn't happened yet and may not happen either. What about a useful show like the history of labor unions, or the history of the American banking system. Any thing that doesn't end with the narrator saying, "It's not a question of if but when it will happen."

Anyway

This Sunday in my small town the fever of doom has gotten so bad that an international group based in Brittan did a presentation at the township hall all about what will, I repeat WILL, happen when, I repeat WHEN, the worlds oil runs out, climate change destroys everything, or just a plain olde great depression. (I live in a town of about 600 people, nearest actual city is about a half hour drive, and yet they came to our rural community with their songs of doom and preparation.)

I say doom because they are resigned to this fate. Nothing in the literature they handed out says anything about prevention or saving our society. Everything they have to say is about how to live in a world without gasoline, a monetary system, ect...

I also heard that shockingly similar is peoples reaction to the movie, Avatar. I have not seen this movie yet although I am planning for next weekend, but I have heard that people are leaving the movie feeling depressed and suicidal because the movie shows this Utopian world and people leave realizing how shitty their lives are and how they will never see anything like that they think about killing them selves. If you life is that meaningless that 3 hours in a movie theater does that to you maybe it is time to make a change, but not kill yourself.

Why is it everyone is so willing to resign to a doom and gloom fate when there is so much we can do to make things better. Several leading scientists have said time after time that we have the ability to prevent these things from happening. We know how to prevent climate change, we have the technology to shift from an oil economy to a diversified energy economy, we can even fix our global economic systems to prevent global economic collapse.

The only real question is will we.

Can we find the will to change the way we do things. Can we stop urban sprawl and the daily 60 mile commute. Can we seriously shift eating habits to less processed foods and less meat.
Can we cut fossil fuel consumption and replace it with a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biofuel. Can we stop destroying virgin habitat for the sake of industry. Can we make recycling a national obsession.

Al Gore said, "We know and have everything we need to prevent this from happening but political will. But, in America political will is a renewable resource."