Where are the answers?

As a kid, my mother used to reprimand sometimes by saying – “...only God can help you now.” George Packer makes a parallel statement in this week’s New Yorker, that God needs to come and only He can help the West Wing the way things are going on with this government.

Whether it is the foreign policy or energy policy, there is a looming frustration. So many people are talking, but the right people are not listening. The Hogans, Fukuyamas, and the Zakarias are being ignored and yet they keep voicing persistently. Fruitless are the efforts of ace game theorists and strategy makers of diplomacy and policy makers of energy.

For me, energy is what I live by during the day. After work, I am engaged in understanding politics and foreign policy, and how history, literature, and anthropology contribute to the way human beings think and develop societies. And my waking hours are completely muddled these days with the current state of affairs. It is disempowering. It is disturbing the anchoring hope that something worthwhile is possible by the tools that are currently available at human disposal. Time may help to soothe, and give clarity to the way things play out, but that’s after the fact.

Conference after conference, meetings after meetings, from living room coffee table talk to water cooler discussions, it seems all the same. People are raising the same questions – over and over and over again. Granted, that problem identification is not easy and to verbalize a problem out of an amorphous ambiguous set of disconnected factual incidents is challenging. But give me a break now. We know what the problems are. Now start answering them. What are you waiting for? Probe anyone on giving answers to - who is going to pay for modernizing the grid, or when will Iraq start exporting oil so that energy prices reduce - and their face turns white. Suddenly, their animated enthusiasm transforms to voice of discomfort. And the obvious way to spin or deflect this situation is by rattling the names of entities who are supposed to do so. It’s is always someone else who is not doing their job.

When did giving half the loaf become an accepted and celebrated fact? If you don’t know well enough who can answer the question, stop asking it. Stop slicing and dicing, if it is the same baloney. You are just slowing the process, bogging down the system, and eating away other people’s valuable time. If you keep doing the same, we as humans will have no choice but to look for answers where we have always looked for when it came hard questions. Why do we live? What is the purpose of my life? Is there an after life? Yes, resorting to the Almighty. With all due respect to my belief it God, it will be a pity that after thousands of years of human civilization that brought our science and political thought from Archimedes to Einstein and Aristotle to Huntington, the only way to resolve our energy and foreign policy problems is by using both of our hands close to us and saying a little prayer.