We the people must learn to share a present. A gift of kindness, love and respect for one another. Don't play, If they try to divide us.
Never give a man's job to a boy. I am describing my "mixed salad" ethics, respect for elders, love thy neighbor, look after the poor is the operating system most functioning societies actually ran on before the current moment.
The dissonance we're feeling is real: a country that still, individually, mostly believes those things is collectively making a decision burn baby burn is destructive, with more coal to train more machines faster that has nothing to do with any of it?
Do we think it's that those values disappeared? Is it that they got outrun by scale and speed. "Love thy neighbor" works at the level of a person, a block, and a congregation. But doesn't translate in deciding whether a data center gets built next to a coal plant, or a so-called public utility deciding whether to keep an old plant running another five years because the alternative is telling a tech client no. Nobody in that chain necessarily stopped being decent. These decisions at a scale where decency is a no show.
There's a gap between what people say they believe and what the systems now do without asking. Paine again, maybe, or Niebuhr's "moral man, immoral society" that's almost exactly this argument, a century old.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote it in 1932, and it still lands like a diagnosis: moral man, immoral society. People, one at a time, are mostly decent. Put them inside a system large enough, a market, a grid, a supply chain, and the decency doesn't disappear. It just stops being consulted.
Nobody voted to burn more coal this year. No engineer building a data center woke up wanting to hurt the poor, or disrespect an elder, or betray a neighbor. Somewhere between the person and the outcome, a thousand reasonable individual choices — approve the permit, meet the deadline, hit the growth target, added up to something none of them would have chosen on their own. That's the trick of scale. It begins to launder intention.
We were raised right. Most of us were. Those rules still work perfectly at a smaller size. They were never given a vote in what a utility does at 3 in the morning when the grid is short and the fastest answer is the dirtiest one.
When will we learn to verify the space between what we believe and what we've built a gap wide enough for a coal plant to live in, unbothered, while every one is insincere to the people in our lives.
The fix is not a better sermon. We already have those. It's going to be smaller systems, shorter chains between the decision and the consequence, the kind where a person can still and program the outcome, the values they were raised with... And so it goes.