I was a young newspaper reporter at the time and I interviewed an economist for insight. We compared 1987 with 1929 and he assured me that almost 60 years after the great crash, we had learned enough to keep a one-day crisis from turning into a global economic disaster. We may have forgotten that in the 20 years since. Here’s a look at the crashes of 1929, 1987 and 2008.

In 1929, much of the blame for the crash was directed at “margin buying.” Margin buying allowed investors to initially pay only a portion of the cost of a share of stock and pay for the rest later. The idea was that one could pay $5 for a $20 share of stock and when the price of the stock rose to $30, the investor could sell it, pay the remaining $15 and keep a $10 profit. Ease of purchase drove up the prices of stock far past their actual value. When the market began to fall, those margin debts were called, and investors didn’t have the cash to cover their losses. “Market psychology,” which determines much of what happens in a stock market, turned to panic and a liquidity crisis developed that sent the market into a tailspin. “Margin buying” was subsequently outlawed.

In 1987, many economists blamed “program trading” for the crash. Computers were still relatively new on the scene and were programmed to buy or sell huge blocks of stock when their prices hit pre-determined numbers. It’s thought that program trading initially drove up share prices (overvaluing the shares as they did in 1929), then when profitable heights were reached, the computers started to sell and the drop in share prices kicked off a mechanical panic soon followed by human panic. People didn’t have the actual cash to cover their transactions and viola, another liquidity crisis. Because much of the problem was based on a technical problem, it was easier for the collective mind of the market to convince itself that the problem could be fixed.

This crisis is more like 1929 than 1987. Instead of people buying stocks on margin, they bought property. People financed (or refinanced) houses based on the notion that they would be able to flip the property in three years for twice what they paid, pay off their debt and clear a profit. Then (here’s the real stupidity) those mortgages were bundled together and sold as investment instruments, like stocks. It worked – for a while. A fire fueled by greed, however, cannot help but burn out of control and that’s what this one did. The market psychology panicked again. This time it was not so much panic as an admission that the whole scheme was fraudulent and bound to fail sooner or later.

Question is: what do we do about it now? Politicians from both parties tell us we need to bail out the high-flying financiers who got us into this mess, because if we don’t, the whole economy will crash.

I don’t buy that and I don’t think citizens should have to buy that with a trillion-dollar bailout that we’ll be paying off for a century. We’re told that we need to take care of the rich and if we do the benefits will “trickle down” to the rest of us. I’ve been hearing this “trickle down” crap for 28 years and I’ve yet to see any evidence that it works.

What we have, at essence, is a mortgage crisis. If the government has to intervene, let it intervene at the mortgage level. If we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, let’s buy up the mortgages, work with homeowners to allow them to stay in their homes and pay off their mortgages at a reasonable rate of interest.

Doing this will first, keep American workers in their homes. Throwing thousands of families into the street will make our economic crisis worse by an order of magnitude. Second, by keeping people in their homes, it will keep those houses off the market and provide a floor to stop the free-fall of housing prices. Third, having the federal government take over the mortgages will guarantee that the money we spend will come back to the federal treasury and the program will pay for itself, instead of passing this debt along to the next three generations.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Ed was recalling the bank failures of the Great Depression and told his listeners, “I don’t know about you, but I’m keeping my money in my hot little hand.” I was just getting to an age when I was aware of things like the economy and I wasn’t sure to what to make of it, but I remember Ed saying over and over, “I’m keeping my money in my hot little hand.”

The next day, there was a bit of a run on local banks and then a discussion of whether Mr. Hasbrouck had been irresponsible to say what he had said or whether the First Amendment trumped all. The panic passed after a few days or a week, people – or at least many of them – put their money back in the bank and life returned to normal.

I spoke to my dad on the phone the other night and he didn’t remember the incident. He and my mom are expecting their first great-grandchild and they both agreed that when it comes to the American economy, they’re glad they’re senior citizens and will not have to deal with the cost of the $700 billion bailout the administration is asking taxpayers for. Or the billion-dollars-a-week tab for the Iraq war. “But what about that great-grandchild?” Dad asked. “Or that kid’s grandchild? They’ll still be paying this off.”

He’s got a point. How big is $700 billion? If I give you a dollar a day, in about three years, you’ll have a thousand dollars. In three thousand years, you’ll have a million dollars. Let’s look at that in the past. If you started collecting a dollar a day a millennium before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, you would now have a bit more than a million dollars.

Million is too paltry a frame for this. Let’s say you started collecting a thousand dollars a day, starting a thousand years before the birth of Jesus. You’d have a bit more than a billion dollars today. But that’s just a billion. To get to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s number you’d have to collect $700,000 dollars a day, every day since 1000 BCE and you’d be just arriving at $700 billion today. In 1000 BCE, the Bronze Age was ending and Iron Age was beginning. David had just become king of Israel.

So that’s $700,000 a day, every day through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Manifest Destiny, two World Wars and – oh yes, the Great Depression. Seven hundred thousand dollars a day. Every day. No weekends. No holidays. For three thousand years.

This is all happening because Mr. Paulson allowed Wall Street investment banks to grow “too big to fail.” Responsible voices have been warning him about a liquidity crisis for 18 months. At first, he refused to admit there was a problem, then (up until about a week ago) said he acknowledged the problem, but said it was “contained.” Suddenly, Mr. Paulson wants you, me and the U.S. Congress to give him a blank check and dictatorial authority.

This week Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said, “If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” He’s got a point, although some people will say that sounds like socialism. (It is. Bernie’s a socialist.) As Patrick Henry might have said, “If this be socialism, make the most of it.” (Or make sure there’s something in it for you.)

Plenty of economists are saying $700 billion won’t be enough to stanch the bleeding. The fact that housing prices continue to drop coupled with the idiotic investment devices that allowed bundles of mortgages to be traded like stocks, means we have yet to glimpse the far side of this abyss.

John McCain, who said last week that the American economy’s fundamentals are strong, now says he’s suspending his campaign and heading back to Washington. George Bush went on tee vee last night and did nothing more than expose his impotence, which might explain Mr. McCain’s trip to DC. If you don’t want people to notice how clueless you are, go stand in a crowd of other clueless people.

Maybe Ed Hasbrouck’s advice was best: get your money out of the bank and keep it in your “hot little hand.” It’s not a patriotic or communitarian idea, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone in Washington looking out for your interests, so maybe you’d better do it yourself.

See if you can get that in euros.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Apologies to Bob Dylan, but my mind has been rewriting the words to his song all week, as I’ve watched the stock market pitch and plummet.

Like John McCain, I admit economics is not my strongest subject. Unlike Mr. McCain, I’m not asking this nation to entrust its economy to me for the next four years. I do know this: our fundamentals are not sound.

Four years ago, as George W. Bush began his second term of office, his big idea was to privatize Social Security. He wanted to take your retirement nest egg out of the hands of government bureaucrats and allow you to invest it with private investment houses – like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Fortunately for us all, Mr. Bush’s asinine idea died a quick death. Imagine if it had not – where would we be today? As it is, instead of privatizing the Social Security fund, we’ve nationalizing the insurance company AIG and now the money markets via taxpayer-funded bailouts.

It’s fitting, I suppose that George Bush is ushered out of office on yet another wave of colossal failure. His eight years in office will be remembered – I predict – as the watershed that turned America from the globe’s only superpower into a second rate debtor nation.

It began with Mr. Bush being installed in office by the right wing of the Supreme Court when it stopped the process of democracy in Florida in 2000. Next up were the disregarded warnings of terrorist attack on the homeland. Mr. Bush decided his August vacation was more important and thousands of Americans died.

Then he lied us into a war of choice, walked away from the Kyoto Treaty, ruined the economy with enormous trade and national deficits, opened the doors to cronyism, corruption and self-dealing. A major American city was washed away by a storm and Mr. Bush ignored it – it conflicted with another of his August vacations. But you know all this. Now the grand feast is complete and the bill and the indigestion arrive at the same moment. We get both as Mr. Bush slinks toward the door.

Come January, a new president and Congress will have to start sorting the messes – economic, foreign policy, energy, military and civil liberties. We do get to choose who those leaders will be, although the choice should be clear even to the densest voter at this point. Regardless, the life we have known is gone; I don’t think it will come back.

Ahead are the years of energy scarcity, when the significant effects of global warming begin to be felt by us all. If we can begin to take care of our citizens with national health care and better schools, we might be able to avoid the dreadful economic drubbing Mr. Bush and the Republicans have prepared for us. Doing so will take a wisdom that has rarely been seen in Congress in the past two decades.

If you’re over 40, you will at least be able to say you grew up in that place where the American dream once lived. Cheap energy, predictable weather, a standard of living that seemed to rise with each generation since the nation’s founding. I hope those of us over 40 can leave something to our children besides memories.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Nearly a year ago, in a Democratic debate, Sen. Barack Obama said that if he is elected president and has a chance to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, he may order military action inside Pakistan without first notifying the Pakistani government. Other Democratic candidates jumped all over him. So did Republican candidates. Sen. John McCain said Mr. Obama “wants to bomb our ally” and pledged never to take action in Pakistan without notifying its government.

What does Mr. McCain say now? Will he criticize Mr. Bush, the man he hopes to succeed; now that Mr. Bush has adopted Mr. Obama’s position? Does Mr. Bush want to “bomb our ally”? Is there one standard for Democratic positions and another for Republican positions? Is Mr. Bush hopelessly naïve when it comes to foreign affairs?

I think he is. To tell the truth, I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Obama (or Mr. Bush) on this one. My point today is not about policy, but politics.

Mr. Obama has long advocated drawing down American troops in Iraq on an 18-month timeline. (I agree with him there.) Everyone jeered him for that, too. Then the Iraqi prime minister came out with the same timeline. Then the Bush administration said, “Well, maybe it’s time to start drawing down those combat troops.”

It seems that within a matter of months, everything Mr. Obama suggests in the area of foreign policy goes from being a matter of scorn to carved-in-stone Republican administration policy. Mr. McCain says Mr. Obama doesn’t have the experience to be president, but when it come to the current president following a candidate’s advice, Mr. Obama is batting .600 and Mr. McCain is batting .300. (I use a baseball metaphor so that, on the off chance Mr. Bush is reading this; he’ll know what I’m talking about.)

Here’s where we stand: today is the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. We are less than two months away from electing a new president. Our nation is at war in two countries on the far side of the world. Our military forces are stretched to the breaking point and thousands of our veterans are returning with physical and psychic wounds that will take decades to heal, if ever. One candidate, Mr. McCain has sung ditties about bombing a third nation, Iran. He has called for policies that would bring us close to war with Russia over the nation of Georgia.

Our economy is a wreck. Banks are failing and home foreclosures are at a rate that has not been seen since the Depression and Dust Bowl. Inflation is up, but the money supply is shrinking. The deficit will likely be a half trillion dollars by inauguration day. Both the stock and currency markets are fluctuating wildly on a daily basis.

Hurricanes ravage our southern coast while entire communities in Alaska are sinking because the permafrost they were built on is melting for the first time in tens of thousands of years. Delegates at the Republican National Convention last week danced in the aisles chanting, “Drill, baby! Drill!”

This week, Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of calling Sarah Palin “a pig.” Please read the preceding three paragraphs again and then realize that Mr. McCain’s top priority this week has been to accuse Mr. Obama of calling Ms. Palin “a pig.” (For the record, Mr. Obama’s pig statement referred to Mr. McCain’s platform, not his running mate.)

When I was in sixth grade, I ran for class office. I lost. I didn’t accuse anyone of name-calling. Maybe I should have.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Barack Obama has committed a similarly classy act. As the headlines filled with stories about Sarah Palin’s pregnant, unwed 17-year-old daughter, Mr. Obama said, “Families are off limits.”

He’s right. Families should be off limits. Whatever one’s opinions are about teen sex, Bristol Palin never asked to have anything other than a private life. Whatever she’s done or she chooses to do, those events have nothing to do with our quadrennial discussion of how best to chart the course of our nation.

Like Bill Clinton, Mr. Obama’s statement – and his desire to stick to the principle he expressed – are doubly classy, in that his wife Michelle has not been given similar respectful treatment by John McCain’s campaign. The Republican Party and its minions at Fox tee vee can find nothing to criticize in this woman, so they make up lies – “terrorist fist bump,” “baby mama,” attempts to put words in her mouth that were never there. They are lies; untruths each more bitter and cynical than the last.

Michelle Robinson Obama is an American we should all be proud of. Born to a working-class family, she – like her husband - climbed into the ranks of influence and power through hard work. To be sure, both Obamas benefited from the help of affirmative action programs, but their biographies stand as testimony to the value of such programs. Giving minority students the chance to achieve not only fulfills their American dream; it makes our country stronger and more resilient.

We, as voters, should evaluate Sarah Palin as we should any politician seeking higher office. Her track record is not long, but her trajectory is clear. As we approach the most crucial energy policy debate in the planet’s history, Ms. Palin would lead us deeper into our catastrophic addiction to fossil fuels. She supposedly “took on the oil companies.” The challenge she mounted was not to push for clean, renewable sources of energy, but to give a bigger slice of the cash to Alaskans.

She supposedly opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere,” but she was for it before she was against it and in the autumn of 2005, when so many in Congress were calling for those wasted millions to be diverted from Alaska pork to hurricane relief on the Gulf coast, Ms. Palin – and Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young – selfishly demanded that the $223 million in federal money stay in Alaska, and so it did.

Speaking of Messrs. Stevens and Young, Mr. Stevens has been indicted for accepting inappropriate gifts (bribes, really) from oil lobbyists and Mr. Young has been under investigation for similar offenses for over a year. They are, however, the Alaska Republican Party’s nominees for the fall election. Ms. Palin campaigns under the banner that she “took on corruption in her own party.” Will she now, on the national stage, disavow her party fellows?

There are the charges that Ms. Palin, in the two public offices she has held – small-town mayor and governor – abused her authority to pursue political and personal vendettas. There is Todd Palin, the candidate’s husband, who for several years was a member of the Alaska Independence Party, which advocates secession from the United States. Although Mr. Palin is not running for office, the political (rather than personal) decisions of one’s spouse, reflect on the candidate. Witness the lead-weight effect of the sleazy business deals of Geraldine Ferraro’s husband.

And then there is the question of values. Just as Bristol Palin’s life should be off limits, so should the decisions Sarah and Todd Palin make as parents. As a public official, Ms. Palin opposed federal funding for sex education in public schools. At this late date, it should be clear that sex education in schools can help teens make informed choices about their lives, avoids unwed and/or unwanted pregnancies.

Closing one’s eyes to the facts of life and hoping for the best is not an effective strategy for avoiding pregnancy or living in the world today. When it comes to Sarah Palin, voters should not close their eyes.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Let’s raise the stakes. Let’s say I have to walk from my house to the border in ten hours. That’s four miles an hour, a brisk pace, sustained for a long period, but it’s doable. Let’s say my task is made easier in that I get to walk along a paved road from here to there: Route 7, from the corner of my street right up to “Welcome Center Road” at the border.

To make my task easier, let’s say I make the walk tomorrow, August 29th. The forecast calls for clear skies and temperatures in the high seventies. A perfect day for a walk. I’ll start at noon and to save everyone’s life, I have to be at the border by 10 p.m. Better get a good night’s sleep and eat a hearty breakfast. There’s so much riding on this.

So, noon comes and I set off along Route 7 at my brisk four-mile-an-hour pace. The first two hours pass and I’ve covered eight miles. There’s only one problem. I walked the wrong way. Instead of walking north, toward Canada, I walked south, toward Shelburne.

I’ve wasted two of my hours and now I have to cover 48 miles in eight hours. If I turn around now, I must make six miles an hour for eight hours straight or terrible things will ensue. I can do this, I know I can. I’ll punish my body to get it done because the stakes are so high and I’ll curse myself with every step of those 48 miles for being so stupid as to walk the wrong way for two hours and put my life and the lives of those I love in even greater peril than they were before

. This is, of course, a metaphor. Two years ago, James Hansen, the guy who knows more about global warming than anyone else on Earth, said we have ten years to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming. In July 2006, Dr. Hansen wrote, “we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” (You can see the full article here.)

Two years on, we’ve been walking in the wrong direction. Even if we elect a new president and Congress that champ at the bit to fight global warming, their most energetic efforts will not begin to gain traction until next summer. That will leave us seven years. Returning to the metaphor, if I spend two hours walking the wrong way and one hour deciding to not walk the wrong way, that leaves me seven hours to cover 48 miles – that’s a pace of nearly seven miles and hour. So now, I’m not walking; I’m running. I’m not as young as I was, but I can cover a mile in less than ten minutes. I can’t do it 48 times in a row.

Of course, we’re not running to Canada, but the kind of social and economic dislocations we will have to undergo will make us wish we were. The alternatives are even less appealing.

Two other things: As I type this, there are two sugar maples outside my window. One has been slowly dying for the last two years. Climate scientists have said the sugar maple’s range will move north with global warming. I can’t say global warming is killing one of my trees, but I won’t replace it with another sugar maple.

Finally, I’m watching Tropical Storm Gustav via the web. Tropical Storm Gustav – for now. It’s moving toward the warm Gulf of Mexico, where it’s likely to pick up moisture and speed. Gustav’s on my mind for the obvious reason, but also because August 29th, the day of the do-or-die hike to Canada in my metaphor, is also the third anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

I’m sure John McCain knows how Gen. Wheeler felt. After weeks of publicly confusing Shia and Sunni, of erroneously stating that Iraq shares a border with Afghanistan and not remembering when the surge he takes credit for began; the Russian invasion of Georgia must feel like cool rain on a hot summer’s day.

It’s so much easier to fight the war of 40 years ago than today’s. We’ve already decided who the good and bad guys are and the history books tell us how it comes out. No need to worry about faceless terrorists or dance carefully around the Constitutionally guaranteed religious rights of Muslims. “We’ve got the damned Russkies on the run!”

Actually, we don’t. Truth is, the situation in Georgia (that’s Georgia on the Black Sea, not the one where Gen. Wheeler was born) is as complicated as Iraq or Afghanistan. In the real Cold War days, Georgia was forcibly integrated into the Soviet Union. The Georgians resented this and when the USSR dissolved, the Georgians pulled out, as did many other republics. Two regions of Georgia – South Ossetia and Abkhazia – are not happy being Georgian. Russia, robust once again, thanks to its oil and natural gas reserves is a) angry that the US and NATO helped Kosovo detach itself from Russia’s ally Serbia in the late ‘90s when Russia was weak and b) none too pleased about having an upstart republic on its southern border, especially one that has allied itself with the US and wants to join NATO.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and de facto autocrat has been playing a clever game of chess with the west with South Ossetia and Abkhazia as his pawns and Georgia as the opposing queen. Because the US and NATO supported Kosovo, he supports the breakaway Georgian regions. Because Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili wants to join NATO, Mr. Putin arranges a situation that makes NATO look weak.

George Bush, for his part, took a minute away from watching the Olympics to warn the Russians not to go too far in their Georgian military campaign, after which the Russians immediately went too far. They know the US cannot and will not come to Georgia’s aid. There’s been a great deal of back and forth in the press about what the US should do about Georgia, but it’s not a “should” question. It’s a “can” question and the answer is, “No, we can’t.”

We can’t because politically we encouraged Kosovo’s separatism and because we are conducting our own unjustified war of choice in Iraq. The big “can’t” – the real “can’t” - is our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched our military too far already; there’s no way we can take on Russia in the Caucuses.

Then there’s the oil issue. As I noted above, Russia is an oil giant these days. There have been plans to run an oil pipeline through Georgia, which Russia sees as the west hedging in on its turf. A few years ago when Ukraine, another former Soviet Republic, got all up in Vlad Putin’s face, he turned off the natural gas in the middle of winter – which also turned off the natural gas for much of Europe. All those European members of NATO remember that, which is why no one in Europe is rushing to send paratroops to Georgia.

This is not the Cold War. This is what happens when nations fail to learn the lessons of the Cold War. Back in the Cold War days, we engaged in the worst kind of identity politics: everything the US did was good, everything the Soviets did was bad – even when we did the same kind of things.

That kind of thinking ignored the complexities of reality then and it’s no more helpful now. We need to remember what kept the Cold War from heating up at the crucial moments was the willingness to speak to one’s opponents, to recognize their real interests and to stand up for one’s own.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Power mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, chain saws and wood chippers - they overlap and blend into an almost-constant symphony of aggravating noise through what would otherwise be the most blissful season of the year.

I’ll give you the chain saws and wood chippers. A city crew was in the neighborhood yesterday, trimming overhanging branches from the roadways and chipping the branches. Trimming branches by hand would take forever and chipping would be impossible. (The chips were taken to our local wood-burning electric plant.)

Gas-powered lawn mowers, on the other hand, seem foolish. I live in a neighborhood of one-eighth acre lots. No one’s going to drop dead of exertion from cutting the grass in a back yard on my street with a human-powered mower.

Worse, the one-cylinder, two-stroke engines in lawn mowers (and weed whackers and leaf blowers) are extraordinarily inefficient. Witness the clouds of blue smoke and oily smell that issue from these engines when they’re fired up. The average lawn mower engine emits four times as much pollution per hour of use than the average automobile. There are no catalytic converters to catch pollutants and no mufflers to catch noise. (The same holds true – in spades – for those other destroyers of summertime peace, personal watercraft.)

The EPA estimates that 17 million gallons of gas are spilled every year while filling lawn equipment. That’s spilled, not used. Seventeen million gallons is one and a half times as much oil as was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. The Humvee parked down at the corner is still as an offensive sight as it ever was, but Lawn Boys and Toros should also start looking that way to us.

Tuesday was a remarkable day in our social history. For the first time, I saw an article in a mainstream media outlet – the Washington Post, in this case – that seriously discussed the possibility that world oil supplies are close to their peak and that demand for oil is outstripping supply.

On one hand, our supply of oil is diminishing, you can argue amongst yourselves how rapidly. On the other hand, we need to drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. As I’ve noted recently (and you can expect to see this over and over) we have eight years to prevent runaway global warming. This is the situation in which we find ourselves and yet, rather than use rakes and brooms, we move leaves around with gas-powered leaf blowers. Rather than trim grass around the edge of the garden with hand clippers (hell, I just let it grow), we use a gas-powered weed whacker.

I don’t want to sound too pious here. Thirty-five years ago, my brother and I cut the grass with a hand-pushed reel mower. We begged our dad for a power mower. (It was cash consciousness, rather than environmental consciousness that dictated his thoughts on the subject.) Finally he gave in and bought a bright green Lawn Boy. Yes, it was easier than the hand mower, but my brother and I soon learned that walking around in circles in the back yard was just as hot and tedious as it had been with the old mower.

A generation and a half later, I still hate cutting the grass. Perhaps if I were more courageous, I’d turn my tiny yard into something like the meadow or forest that was here before the white people showed up and started blasting their engines.

We have eight years left. Eight years in which we need to do things. We had ten years, but we spent the first two making things worse, not better, which means the sacrifices we’ll have to make in the remaining years will have to be more painful. If we continue to insist on burning gas for the simplest of chores that we could do by hand, there’s not much reason for hope.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

My friend has more self-awareness than many of our fellow citizens. How often are we subjected to someone on a street corner braying into his or her cell phone like a homeless jackass?

Remember when cell phones came out and everyone got one “just for emergencies”? Do you just use your cell phone only for emergencies? Have you EVER used your cell phone for an emergency? It was a contrived justification, like the line about driving an SUV: “I just feel safer.”

This week Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, sent a memo to 3,000 members of the staff, advising them to limit their cell phone use. If they must use a cell phone, Dr. Herberman said, they should use a wireless headset or the speaker phone option. He strongly advised that children not be allowed to use cell phones.

Dr. Herberman admits there is a dearth of peer-reviewed studies to back his position, which is why he issued a memo, rather than a press release. He made news nonetheless. In many cases of carcinogenicity, there’s a latency period between exposure and the onset of cancer. Smoking can cause cancer, but not the morning after your first cigarette. The latency period for many carcinogens is estimated at 20 years. It’s now 20 years since cell phones first came into common use, so if there’s a connection, we may soon start to see epidemiological evidence.

Senator Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor – a glioma – is the type of cancer that can be expected from heavy cell phone use. If cell phone related-cancer begins to emerge, it will first manifest itself among politicians, lobbyists and PR professionals. (For one thing, it would be the rarest form of industrial disease, because usually the cancerous burden falls on the poor and powerless.)

If an adult can cook one’s brain with two decades of cell phone use, the danger is greater for children, whose brains are still developing, which is why Dr. Herberman is so intent on discouraging cell phone use by youngsters. (Fortunately, one does not hold a cell phone up to one’s head when one is texting, which may be the saving grace for the youth.)

What kind of a doctor is this Ronald Herberman anyhow? He doesn’t have any proof cell phones cause cancer – and he admits that - yet here he is warning people not to use them because they MIGHT be harmful.

What if other doctors behaved that way and warned people to avoid things that might harm their health? What if doctors and – heaven forbid, government regulators who are supposed to protect our health – demanded to know if products are safe before they’re put on the market? What if the 6,000 chemicals in common use had to be tested for safety (and for potential interaction with the other 5,999 chemicals)?

OK, OK, let me get off my high horse for a minute and let’s talk (perhaps by cell phone). Now that you’ve heard Dr. Herberman’s warning, are you going to give it up or cut down your use or use a wireless headset or use the speaker phone option? I don’t think the cell phone makers are too worried about this. As soon as I read the article, I started thinking up excuses – “I didn’t own a cell phone until six years ago and I didn’t use one often until two years ago….” So what? So I’ve got 18 years before I worry about brain cancer?

We’re all hooked and the phone companies know we’re hooked. We don’t really like our cell phones - I don’t like mine - but 20 years on, the social latency period has expired, we’ve integrated them into our lives and we’d have a hard time getting along without them.

That much has already been proved by the enormous cell phone bills we pay every month.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

So here we go again and let’s see if we can find some reason to chase the clouds away. It won’t be easy. What’s sticking in my mind is a piece New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a week ago about the leaders of the G-8 nations failing to take any action on the Darfur genocide at their recent meeting.

Mr. Kristof ran through the reasons for inaction – that more people die annually of more soluble problems, that perhaps we should apply our efforts where we will get the most significant results. A fine argument, if the industrialized world actually did anything significant to combat malaria or AIDS, but our efforts are not commensurate with what is needed. Our efforts are not even commensurate with what we spend on say, pet care.

The factor Mr. Kristof failed to note is that what’s happening in Darfur is spurred in a large part by global warming. More people are fighting over less and less arable land as the desert encroaches. The Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide all had a number of political factors in their making, but none were about lack of farmland.

So while George W. Bush may express skepticism about global warming, his aides are careful not to let him fall into a trap. If he takes the kind of decisive action on Darfur that Mr. Kristof and others urge, then he’s set a precedent and Mr. Bush is wary of setting precedents, at least where positive actions are concerned. Worse, alert people might point out that he’s doing more for the victims of global warming in Sudan that he’s done for the victims of global warming along the Gulf Coast and even though he will never run for office again, it just doesn’t look good. The legacy and all that.

So, how’s this not dark? Two ways. One, Al Gore gave a great speech about how we have the means to do better, right now, in curbing our emissions of greenhouse gases. He understands what James Hansen is talking about when he says we have less than ten years to turn global warming around. The time we have is time for doing something and we have to use that time wisely. If we do start to turn things around, then there won’t be as many other Darfurs.

The other point is that even with our best effort in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, more terrible things, like Hurricane Katrina and the drought affecting North Africa, are happening and more will happen. The good news is that our response to these situations does not need to be lame, as it was with Katrina or savage, as has been the case with the janjaweed militias in Sudan.

The bottom line is, we need to drastically reshape our society. We in the industrialized world cannot keep on as we have been. We need not shed our necessities, but the stupid stuff, the video games and game shows and all the excess will have to go. At the same time, we will have to open our borders and our hearts to people from all over the globe. This applies specially to me and people in my neighborhood, where the effects of global warming will be less severe than other places – at least during my lifetime.

In my own life, my resistance to things I don’t like is mostly based on mental stubbornness. I have to sit and ask, “how bad could this be?” if “this” is the thing I don’t want to do. How bad could it be to have millions of refugees streaming into our nation? Pretty bad, although better than having famine sweep across our land, as it will elsewhere.

As we pull back from our hyper-energized early 21st century, we’ll probably discover older virtues, like compassion, sharing, mutual aid. Maybe we’ll rediscover that virtue is its own reward. Maybe we’ll realize how lucky we’ve been all along and how lucky we’ll still be compared to so many others.

© Mark Floegel, 2008