Decency vs The Single Greatest Threat To America

Not one American in a hundred thousand realizes we are rapidly running out of water. Something so delicious, so vital to life, which we take for granted, is going to alter life in America more than any other one factor of the next several decades, outside of the catastrophes that occur once or twice each century. Sadly, from a statistical coign of vantage, it's probable that the world's water supply will fit this category.

Water is critical to life. We take it for granted. If you haven't lived in a situation with low or nonexistent water supplies, you by definition have limited ability to understand how profoundly it affects your life. Security issues are resolvable with less effort than the problem of excess consumption. Whereas this or the next U.S. Administration will most likely take action to safeguard our water supplies, it will be only from the secondary threat.

If each person reduces their current water consumption ten percent, the U.S. would have enough water until the next century, by which time desalinization will be affordable for all nations. At current usage, water will most likely cost over one hundred dollars per gallon by 2020.

The only ones laughing at that are limited in their ability to subtract the current rate of use from the known supply. Although already 2003, we hear no major public outcries to repair a life-threatening problem which will carry a price tag greater than money.

What words or pictures might competently impel action on the part of all Americans to pull together now, in the interests of protecting those who are alive today, and the next generations as well?

With the internationally undiminished polluting of sizable bodies of water, there are, believe it or not, no more large sources of clean water. We're on the planet's last one, and it's heavily polluted on a daily basis. When Americans deal with no more running water, with rare supplies selling for hundreds of dollars per gallon, they are sure to ask how we could have been so greedy. If you can do your math, you see it will occur before your grandchildren have grandchildren of their own. Each and every one of us who turns on the tap, hose, pump, must monitor ourselves, because at the end of it all, you cannot legislate human decency.

History will record that terrorist attacks, by and large, have finite numbers of victims per event. Catastrophic levels of water loss is finite only insofar as you count a nation's total population, rather than the generally local effect of an event. Our water supply is no longer measured in centuries or scores; not even measured in decades, so it's time to pay attention.

After reading a book or so each day for fifteen thousand days and beyond, the rare bet I'd take is that we are in the last full decade of unchecked water usage. Splurge and enjoy to your heart's content, or think of tomorrow, because after all is said and done, you cannot legislate human decency.