BLAME PLACEMENT We seem to more time and money trying to place blame for some of our least admirable decisions rather than to find solutions to some of the problems themselves.
We couldn't even throw a decent "Boston Tea Party" today or write a Volstead Act to force all of the nation to go dry without
deciding just who we might blame if either plan went wrong. We'd spend weeks in determining which Indian tribes we could pretend to be upset in future court room procedures by setting precedents. We would feel obligated to say we did whatever it was we were going
to do as a surprise.
Maybe you saw the item in the news just a day or two saying the price of Mexican tortillas has skyrocketed in recent weeks. The price was said to have risen by seven or nine per cent causing untold suffering millions of tortilla lovers to face starvation.
Blame for disaster has been on the United States of America.
It has come about as a direct result, you may wish to know, of our sudden use of millions of bushel of good, green ears of corm being mashed and boiled to become ethanol to keep our stretch limos, semis, RV's and our ever-growing numbers of large, gas-hog cars on the road. I have not been aware of any glut of excess supplies of any fuel my local filling station, have you? I know that many bands of gasoline already contain small amounts of ethanol and a score of small plants eye refining more as needed.
Environmentalists of some sort are speaking out against such alternate fuels,too, because "as long as we have hunger in this world we have no right to use for foods for fuel."
They blame us. We blame them.
There must be some middle road we can travel together.
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 1-14-07 [c324wds]
