You’ve been feeding yuck to your beloved daughter since she
was an infant. But the label doesn’t say “yuck.” It says “Yum”. Your girl is a
teenager now, and she still loves it. “Yum makes me powerful”, she says.
Indeed, she’s become a top student and athlete. She insists on having Yum every
day, and gets angry or depressed when she can’t. You’ve know that Yum can be
helpful even when consumed in very modest quantities along with balanced diet
of natural foods. But your child finds moderation impossible, and you indulge
her.
Yum isn’t cheap; in fact, it’s breaking the family budget.
You’ve taken on a dangerous second job with a long commute to keep buying Yum,
which gets more expensive every year. Not surprising, the maker of Yum is fabulously
wealthy. And he invests a good deal of his profits in government, which helps him
conceal three facts from the consumers of Yum. The first secret is that overuse
of Yum is quite unhealthy. It leads to obesity and asthma; worse, it accumulates
in your bone marrow and takes decades to get rid of. Prolonged consumption of Yum
causes yuck syndrome, which leads to an early, agonizing death. The second
secret is that Yum’s key ingredient has a finite supply, and at current
consumption rates, it will be gone well before your only child will reach 50.
Third, most of that ingredient is under the control of an organized crime
syndicate, the leader of which has expressed a bitter disdain for your way of
life.
Your dear daughter always had good medical checkups, but in
the past year there have been some disturbing signs – weight gain, difficulty
breathing, and increasing bouts of fever, headaches, nausea. Almost every doctor
and specialist with whom you’ve consulted says it’s the Yum…except one, who
says the studies aren’t conclusive enough to risk taking precipitous action (curiously,
in the waiting room, you notice a plaque listing the clinic’s major
underwriters, including the maker of Yum.) An increasing number of
nutritionists say there are many ways to achieve the performance benefits of
Yum without the health risks, or the expense. Your daughter is smart; she knows
about the dangers of Yum, but cannot control her appetite for it. As predicted,
the local supermarket has run out, so you venture into the slums to buy it on
the street. The dealer accepts credit, but after a few weeks you miss a payment.
The next day you find a crudely scrawled note on the shattered windshield of
your SUV: “Pay up or she dies.”
You neighbor and best friend sees you standing by the car
with the note in your hand. He knows what’s been going on. Gently but firmly,
he says you need to get your kid off Yum. But you resist. All you can think of
is how much your girl enjoys Yum, that you don’t have the heart to take it
away. You tell your neighbor that you keep hearing on your TV news station that
scientists still disagree about the risks of Yum, and besides, “health food” is
so expensive.
The story of Yum is an accurate metaphor of our relationship
with fossil fuel. Yum, of course, is oil, coal, and natural gas. We are, as the
President says, addicted to it, and though the fact of human-induced global
warming grows clearer as the scientific evidence advances and the glaciers
recede, we are reluctant to break the addition, preoccupied by this “war on
terror.” If you think radical Islam is terrifying, go stand out in a Category 5
hurricane, envision northern California with Baja California weather, or image England
with Greenland’s climate. And even on the slight change that Yum/oil might not be
causing personal/climate cancer, why should we continue to divert the lion’s
share of the personal/national treasury to those who vow to destroy our way of
life? Why would we engage in dangerous jobs/wars to prolong an addiction that
cannot last, when, with some courage and creativity, we could discover a far,
far better alternative?
Stay tuned for Chapter 2, and the happy ending.