The Government will be lucky if they can answer the phone five years from now

Remarks by James Howard Kunstler at the meeting of The Second Vermont Republic October 28, 2005 When we think about the destiny of our land, there are a few questions we might ask: What do we mean by 'our land?' What has been holding it together? Who are we? And who will we become? For about 210 years we have been a federal democratic republic composed of more than a few states, eventually adding up to fifty. At times, the citizen's identity has shifted from allegiance to a particular state to the republic as a whole - as when Robert E. Lee, for instance, famously declared that he was first a citizen of Virginia. Lately the tendency has been for citizens to think of themselves first as Americans, and secondarily as New Yorkers or Virginians or Vermonters. What has held us together - at least since the convulsion of the Civil War - is a common culture and especially the common enterprise of a great industrial economy. For much of our history, including the first half of the 20th century, we were a resourceful, adaptive, generous, brave, forward-looking people who believed in earnest effort, who occupied a beautiful landscape full of places worth caring about and worth defending. Since then, lost in raptures of easy motoring, fried food, incessant infotainment, and desperate moneygrubbing, we became a nation of overfed clowns who believed that it was possible to get something for nothing, who ravaged the landscape in an orgy of wanton carelessness, who believed they were entitled to lives of everlasting comfort and convenience, no matter what, and expected the rest of the world to pay for it. We even elected a vice-president who declared that this American way of life was non-negotiable. We now face the most serious challenge to our collective identity, economy, culture, and security since the Civil War. The end of the cheap fossil fuel era will change everything about how we live in this country. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to do things differently - whether we like it or not. We are at or near the all-time maximum global oil production peak. We do not have to run out of oil to find ourselves in trouble. When world demand for oil exceeds the world's ability to produce oil, all the complex systems we depend on will de-stabilize. Everything from national chain retail, to the Archer Daniel Midland Cheez Doodle and Pepsi model of agriculture, to the arrangements for heating our homes and lighting our cities will begin to wobble. Some of these things will fail us and begin to change our lives. At the same time, we will be tempted to join a worldwide scrambl...

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