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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Lessons taught but never learned

I've been sober for over 22 years. Before my tenth anniversary sobriety date I took the time to reflect on what my sobriety has allowed me to learn. A few considerations:
  1. Never confuse activity with progress. A dog chasing his tail can cover miles and stay in exactly the same place.
  2. Never confuse the truth with honesty. People can tell part of the truth and lead people to believe that which is not true. It's called deception. And the deceiver walks away with a clear conscience.
  3. Never confuse education, knowledge and wisdom. What you've been taught, what you know and how you apply it can all be neatly separate. I've seen people with double PhD's not be able to some seemingly simple tasks.
  4. Never, ever confuse being taught the lesson with learning the lesson. "Well, I certainly learned my lesson!" is not accurate. It may very well be that the lesson was indeed taught. However, whether or not it was learned, and how well, will only become evident over time.
And as I read the new energy bill, it becomes all to apparent that those with their hands on the levers of power that force you and I to do their bidding have never , ever learned any lessons at all. The best that can be said is that it is an anti-energy bill. The anti-energy bill authors would be the ones who believe they have the power, wisdom and insight that if they can create and pass just the right bill, and that noisy barking dog next door will finally purr like a kitten and the whole neighborhood can finally get some sleep. Omniscient and omnipotent are terms and beliefs they all hold close to their intellectual breasts...and have, to our great and long term detriment, believed them to be true of them.
The Heritage Institute has a great analysis of the anti-energy bill. And instead of pushing failed ethanol , a real push should be oil shale. And Heritage also has a large number of research papers dealing with the huge oil reserves we have here in America that the anti-energy bill prevents us from using (go to the Heritage Foundation, go to the "search" function in the upper right hand corner and type in "oil" and click on any one of the drop down menu items. Incredible!). This anti-energy bill makes about as much sense as a law preventing a home owner from using his own fire extinguisher to put out a fire in his house.

posted by Amendment X at 12:53 PM permalink

1 Comments:

Blogger The Lady Logician said...

Congrats on the sobriety. As someone who has lived with an alcoholic (father), I know how hard it is to get and stay sober.

Ya done good.

LL

9:52 AM  

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