Friday, September 23, 2005

McWhat?

Often liberals define themselves negatively, by which I mean they trumpet what they are not, not what they are.

If you don't believe me go to any health food store frequented by your local liberals and take a look at the shelves where you'll see:


Chips with no salt.
Bread with no gluten.
Coffee with no caffeine.
Soap with no scent, or no phosphates.

With politics it is much the same. Liberals are anti-Bush, anti-monopoly, anti-war, and anti-discrimination.

I confess I am guilty of falling into the same trap.

This is too bad because a lot of ideas on the left are very good for America. It is time, I think, to transform the way we talk. It is time to talk about what we are rather than what we are not.

One thing many on the left are for is energy independence, particularly sustainable non-polluting energy sources. This makes sense for our foreign policy, or environmental policy, our economic policy, and our security (no vulnerable dependencies).

With wind-mills, for instance, we all breathe cleaner air and forgo nuclear meltdown dangers and furthermore have enough wind to harness to supply all of America's power. Yet this progressive, forward-looking vision gets discussed as anti-nuclear, anti-coal, and anti-oil talking-points, which are nowhere near as unifying or constructive.

To that end here is a great idea my wife had.

She is a fan of old-time country music and heard that Willie Nelson was starting a bio-diesel company. She asked me what biodiesel was and I explained it was diesel fuel made from vegetable fats and how we could make our own using a kit sold by Home Power (I'm a subscriber).

She thought about that for a few moments and said, "Wow! McDonald's is sitting on a gold-mine. Why don't they take all that grease, team up with Willie, and add bio-diesel filling stations at their locations? You could buy McFuel with your McNuggets!"

In that moment I knew once again I made the right choice when I married.

Can you imagine the immense good this would do to McDonald's reputation among environmentalists?

Why not have our cars filled up as we wait in the drive-thru lane anyway? Now that's what I call convenient!

I'm lovin' it!

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Foot Quotes

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

Charles Darwin