Word: blame
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nixon would have us believe that the burden of the blame for this lies principally on two sets of shoulders: the Arabs' and our own. As any veteran Nixon-watcher would guess, he is guilty of errors of both omission and commission here. America is in a crisis, he announces gravely: The crazed Arabs, endowed only with anatomical fortuity, have put their thumb astride our jugular. These are not familiar, white-skinned Europeans, polite Belgians or Dutchmen, who will calmly accede to our reasonable requests. These are berobed bedouin upstarts, mustachioed bandit sheiks, out to black-mail Uncle Sam till...
...energy candle at both ends? Here the man has a potent answer, one that the public can easily accept. While the Arab embargo excuse relies upon the mystique of an inscrutable, hostile foreign force, this second attempted explanation dredges up an enormous untapped American resource: guilt. We are to blame, Nixon explains, painfully pointing the finger at one and all, dimming the lights on the White House Christmas tree, deigning to ride the train down to Key Biscayne for the holidays. And after a decade of guilt-breeding Indochina war, the public eats...
Sanders can blame the energy crisis for half of his upcoming weekend headache. Not only is the fuel shortage raising the cost of maintaining his Cadillac Fleetwood with the "Celtics 16" license plates, but it caused the Brown game, originally slated for February 1, to be rescheduled because of the academic calendar change...
...elected representatives apply the taxes to killing innocent people, that's another matter. A majority vote doesn't stop killing from being wrong or absolve the people who do it of blame. A million murderers who band together are still a million murderers and if it is right to resist injustice, it is right to resist injustice committed by a group. If it is right to try to stop a thug from beating up an old lady, it is right to try to stop a million or 200 million voters from killing distant but equally helpless old ladies...
...When blame is apportioned for the crisis, however, the Nixon Administration and the oil industry have plenty of company. Who gets the rest? Just about everybody. "The central thing is that the whole economy was based on growth," says Caltech Environmentalist Lester Lee, "and there was almost a religious conviction that growth and per capita energy use go together. That was a hard assumption to challenge." Paul Ehrlich agrees: "Our whole economic system is set up to maximize profits and put the emphasis on more production rather than on less usage...