clean energy

Many Americans are depressed. Why would that be the case in such a wealthy and wonderful country? I imagine much of the time it's because people don't have meaningful work to do. They might be jobless, or might have jobs that ultimately do more harm to society than good. There are many such jobs in the mainstream these days. Maybe even most.

In our current "system," work that doesn't cause harm generally doesn't pay very well. That's not a system. That's a global pig-fuck.

But people tend to have families to feed. Or expensive habits. Or both. So people go along to get along and everything keeps sliding into the shitter, while the poor suffer and the wealthy try to distract themselves from the damage they do with ever greater parties and ever more obscene luxuries.

Even if people have enough genuinely joyful distractions to prevent them from focusing on this whole "sliding inexorably into the shitter" thing, many of them are vaguely aware of it, and it makes them vaguely uneasy. They don't quite know, or admit, why. But they just feel depressed. So we medicate them with Prozac and the like, to keep them in the game. Like shooting the QB's knee full of a local anesthetic, it enables continued service while increasing the damage to oneself, and perpetuates the game that causes the harm in the first place. From my own life, antidepressants once made it possible for me to keep getting up in the morning and driving myself in a shitbox car on a dreary highway to go to sit in a windowless mailroom performing an utterly mindless routine in service to a ridiculous and utterly wasteful industry, for such little pay that it only sustained me enough to keep me showing up for the godawful work. Woo hoo.

Instead of that, people with no jobs, or with shitty oppressive jobs, should have access to a system that makes it easy for them to transition into well-paying work helping to create the sustainable clean-energy future. Tax money should no longer go toward anything that kills or poisons anyone anywhere or damages wildlife and ecosystems. That, of course, will free up hundreds of billions of dollars to devote to creating, running and maintaining sustainable clean-energy systems free to all people everywhere.