Americans don't seem to understand much of anything unless we restate it in a war-metaphor: War on Drugs War on Terror War on Poverty War on Science War on Democracy And now there is a "War Against Floods," which we battle with the "Army Corp of Engineers." And I forgot to mention some of the other wars: [More . . . ]
Time to photoshop out those women, for reasons of modesty. 
At Truthout, Ellen Dannen points out that we live almost entirely in the present, as consumers:
As consumers, we live today in a perpetual now, ingesting and eliminating. But our ancestors understood the importance of being conservative, of conserving. They saw the value of building infrastructure of lasting value - not thinking only of themselves - but building also for their children and progeny yet to be. They understood, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the taxes they paid were the price of admission to life in a civilized society. They understood that to live in a civil society required providing real nourishment, including the best education possible, for everyone. That society at least gave lip service to the principle that, "What you have done to the least of these you have done to me." The things they produced and created still contribute to our security and progress. Among other things, they created a high-quality, heavily subsidized system of education that eliminated cost as a bar and made our country a leader in so many areas. We would be better off today had we properly valued their investment in us, rather than having consumed and destroyed so much of that inheritance.I consider this issue often. If one were really to implement "family values," would we be trashing the planet and failing to plan for the future? Wouldn't we be obsessed with making sure that our children will have access to a well-cared-for planet on which they can live out their lives, one they can hand to their children? But as a government, we really do seem to be living in the present, dealing with the disasters as they arise rather than taking steps to avoid them. We excel at kicking the can down the road just a bit, putting off for another day.
Net Neutrality is not about government takeover of the Internet. This claim of a government takeover is a lie being spread by Republicans who have taken steps to give the big telecoms control over the kinds of programs you can make use of over the Internet and the kind of content that is freely accessible. Please, take a only a minute or two, to join me and take action on this critical issue. Your voice is needed to counteract AT&T's annual $15 Million in campaign contributions, and 93 full-time lobbyists. In this video, Senator Al Franken explains net neutrality, using YouTube as the perfect example. I've been following this issue closely for several years, but I've never before heard net neutrality explained more clearly than Senator Franken explains it here:
In the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt has invoked group selection theory to explain why so many people outwardly celebrated the death of Osama Bin Laden. To understand why the reaction was natural and predictable rather than primal and boorish, Haidt pointed out that we are more than "selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves." We often do function like this, but we, unique among primates (and akin to bees and ants) simultaneously function intensely at a second higher level.
This [higher level] competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense. Early humans found ways to come together as well, but for us unity is a fragile and temporary state. We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees.As Emile Durkheim pointed out, humans don't merely act on narrowly focused selfishness; rather, they are subject to emotions that "dissolve the petty, small-minded self. They make people feel that they are a part of something larger and more important than themselves." Human beings can be knitted together through a benign "collective effervescence" that goes by the name of "patriotism," which Haidt distinguishes from "nationalism,"
[T]he view that one’s own country is superior to other countries and should therefore be dominant. Nationalism is generally found to be correlated with racism and with hostility toward other countries, but patriotism by itself is not."