The Can-do Attitude Meets a Changing World

Too many Americans oppose and prevent serious efforts to head off problems until they become a crisis. They think we can postpone dealing with global warming, abuses in criminal trials, predictable shortages of fuel, food or water, threats to our health, and the backlash from our military adventures in the Middle East, among others.

It could be called denial. Or maybe it’s just a part of a can-do attitude, the attitude that built America.

The Environmental Action Agenda

A few months ago, both Steve Leibo and I brought attention to an MIT study that suggested that a carbon tax could be a win-win-win solution. It would meet some Republican and some Democratic objectives, by allowing Congress to keep income taxes low, allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, yet fund Democratic social policies, all the while reducing our use and dependence on carbon based energy, which is destroying the environment, and is likely to leave an uninhabitable earth for our grandchildren.

What’s up with gun rights

What’s the NRA’s big attachment to assault weapons? Why do we have to suffer the weapons of mass murder?

One NRA member from Texas told an NPR reporter, “As far as I’m concerned, if you can afford to buy a tank, you should be able to buy a tank.” He explained: “the Second Amendment was put in not to hunt, not to go plink at cans, not to shoot at targets. If and when tyranny tries to take over our country, we can fight it.” NRA President Porter, too, wants people to be “ready to fight tyranny.” Porter, told an audience last June, when he was NRA vice-president, that “We got the pads put on, we got our helmets strapped on, we’re cinched up, we’re ready to fight, we’re out there fighting every day.”

Trying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

It seems clear that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev exploded bombs at the Boston Marathon. Although some wanted him tried as an enemy combatant outside of the requirements of the Constitution, the Obama Administration has brought charges in the federal courts.

It’s fascinating how some Americans treat our Constitution. On the one hand, many people make a fetish about what the Founders thought and did in the eighteenth century, and on the other many, often the same people, argue that the Constitution is simply irrelevant, doesn’t apply, can safely be ignored or forgotten.

Let’s get past that one quickly. Although the evidence so far does not fit the definition, the Constitution has a very clear notion of what to call Americans who adhere to our enemies – “traitors.”