Thinking about Milk ... and Oil

Suppose you live in a small town. Your name is Wilson. In your small town there is only one milkman. One Saturday you are down town shopping and you see the milkman standing on an apple crate in the town square. In a loud voice he is listing all the miseries people in the town have experienced.

Suddenly he turns toward you and screams. “There is the reason.”

He points to you and says in a menacing voice “We need to rid our town of Mr. Wilson. And all Mr. Wilson’s friends.”

Now you are a rather large man. Certainly you’re a match, physically, for the milkman or any of the other town folk. You laugh and walk into the hardware store.

The owner of the hardware store is a friend of yours. He comes up and says, “The milkman is crazy. He’s been saying all week that he is going to get rid of you. Get you to move out of town – even out of the state. If you don’t go, something worse will happen to you. And to me!”

Now consider your and the hardware store owner’s reaction.

Milk is difficult to find. So, even though the milkman has raised his prices, you and the hardware store owner keep buying milk. You and your families keep drinking the milkman’s milk. You keep paying the milkman ever increasing prices.

Would you really do this in your own life?

I’ll bet you wouldn’t. You’d move away. If you couldn’t move, you’d find another source for your milk. If you couldn’t find another source, you’d stop drinking milk.

America and the western world is like Mr. Wilson and his friend. Mr. Wilson is hooked on milk and it must be cow’s milk. He has lots of goats living in his yard – but he won’t drink goat’s milk. He has soybeans growing on his farm but he won’t drink soy-milk. He even has an artesian well supplying unlimited amounts of powdered milk but he won’t drink powdered milk.

Mr. Wilson must be certifiably insane. You’d never keep buying milk from the crazy milkman if you were Mr. Wilson, would you

But we keep buying oil. We buy oil from an oilman who wants to kill us. We’re hooked on Middle Eastern oil. Even though we have lots of coal right in our own yard we won’t use gasoline made from coal. We too have soybeans growing on our farms but we won’t use biodiesel. We have the capability to produce boundless amounts nuclear power but we won’t use nuclear power.

We must be certifiable insane. Why do we keep buying oil?

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You can easily substitute other resources for milk in the above discourse. While it was originally written as comment on America's apparently insane addiction to foreign oil, it can also be applied to health care in the political discussions of 2009.