Alaska’s Senate Majority,
I think we’ve bypassed the threshold prior to which we could have deterred the most egregious consequences of a worsening daily climatic catastrophe: Which is, either directly or (for those less inter-disciplinarily aware) indirectly subverting Alaska’s budgetary woes. The choices we as a society make now will either bring us closer to recouping the splendorous and Edenic, garden Earth of our youth or bring us with more catastrophic certainty each new day to the drudging misery of terminal disease.
The “cut-and-dry” reality is optimism or pessimism. Calculating all our choices to maximize self-gain, whether one is thinking in the immediate here and now or to forego impulse pleasure for bigger profit at some future point, will not recognize that every event, interpersonal or interactional, wants only to widen or ‘blossom’ its future related choices. I am the last person who wants to compromise my virtue on a commitment I’ve contracted, but if we don’t start recouping some of the privately enriching energy Alaska has so freely dispensed over the last decade (with our freewheeling oil tax giveaways) and instead enliven the basic economy with that symbol we use for energy transfer, money, barring some divine happenstance, the condemning of our children to choices of either/or lesser degrees of hurt, is only “killing them softly” with our “pretended” love.
As servants of Alaska’s social good do the right thing, the optimistic thing, for our state, our economic and physical, intellectual and spiritual health, wealth and well-being, by conferencing in concurrence with the House Bill 111. Stop driving us further into a tunnel of indebtedness with no light at the end!
And finally, get yourselves out of Dodge… please!
John Sonin
Juneau