Let’s get past pettiness, solve our problems

Teresa Krolak-Owens, Las Vegas

Thursday, April 2, 2009 | 2:04 a.m.

Kudos to The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman for one of his recent thought-provoking columns that appeared in the Las Vegas Sun. Rather than engage in the same old hand-wringing rhetoric about our current economic situation, Mr. Friedman deftly pointed out that it is simply a waste of time and precious intellectual resources to try to get back to where we were.

We are at the threshold of a new era, and it is absolutely imperative to come up with a new dialogue and a new vision that may lead to questions such as:

• How does one find personal happiness without conspicuous consumption?

• How might a company profit from producing something or engaging in activities that promote peace?

• How might a renewable resource (that is, endless supply) be profitably developed in an economic system that says profit is a function of supply and demand?

• What jobs might we create that don’t depend on someone buying something that needs to be replaced so soon after purchase?

This is just a small start.

Let’s start thinking about these kinds of things and stop wasting our precious time and energy screaming about who has the best plan to reestablish the very way of doing things that has put us in this situation in the first place.