Look at Thomas Jefferson who so eloquently and passionately worded the Declaration of Independence, acknowledging the rights of each individual man. Yet he owned slaves, and almost certainly fathered children with a slave, a woman who had no choice about whether she would be in his household or not, where she might go, if she might marry. He knew in a most intimate way the degradation of people in bondage. Such a divide between his beautiful ideals and his behavior. How many people might have benefited from one man growing more aware!

Today we let our financial appetite and transportation habits overrule our ethics in the use and control of oil. We play blind to the pollutants of air and water, the disabling dependance on lands that do not belong to us to feed our habit, our reluctance to rein in that appetite and pollution through change and ingenuity, the unconscious politics guided by those who benefit most from oil profit, the escalation of our own and others’ bloodshed. We, like Jefferson, play blind. How much work it is to pretend our habits are ethical. How much division within our family.

We did finally, through the great carnage of the War Between the States, manage to confront our dissonance between slavery and the ideals of our country. We grew as a country as a result of that very hard lesson. Perhaps we might soon manage, this time without escalation of bloodshed, to confront our dissonance in our relationship with oil. Our ideals are good ones, even if we humanly struggle to live up to them.

That clarity of vision starts with the individual and makes ripples that travel who knows where.