Below is an article from Saturday's paper by Thomas Friedman, 9/11 and 4/11, from the New York Times. I generally like what Friedman has to say, and this article is no different. He often says unpopular things but he says them in such reasonable manner, I don't understand how anyone could not agree with him. Now, if only more people were reading what he writes...

So, in case you missed this, here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/opinion/20friedman.html?hp

And if you don't want to read the whole thing, here's a little highlight:

After 9/11, Mr. Bush had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping. After gasoline prices hit $4.11 last week, he had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on clean energy. Instead, he told us to go drilling.

Neither shopping nor drilling is the solution to our problems.

What doesn’t the Bush crowd get? It’s this: We don’t have a “gasoline price problem.” We have an addiction problem. We are addicted to dirty fossil fuels, and this addiction is driving a whole set of toxic trends that are harming our nation and world in many different ways. It is intensifying global warming, creating runaway global demand for oil and gas, weakening our currency by shifting huge amounts of dollars abroad to pay for oil imports, widening “energy poverty” across Africa, destroying plants and animals at record rates and fostering ever-stronger petro-dictatorships in Iran, Russia and Venezuela.

Ah, all so true.

I have also been a little slow on the gold star awards lately, mostly due to the rather long length of the last few posts, but I have not forgotten Caroline. Caroline gets two gold stars! The first for getting a second car seat for her car so that she can carpool her daughter's friends around town, which she is now doing. The second is for switching to powder laundry detergent (I think she told me laundry and not dishwasher??? This is why I shouldn't get too far behind) so that it is packaged in paper instead of plastic. This is also great because the heavy and bulky water used to make the detergent a liquid isn't unnecessarily shipped around the country using up even more fossil fuels. Excellent changes!