I’m intrigued with the question of how priorities get shaped in the big media outlets. I think this can be traced back to calculations about what will drive up advertising revenues and what fits with the sponsors’ priorities, for better or for worse. So how can we change those priorities? Can peak oil be in the headlines without some shocking domestic calamity to bring the issue home to readers?

I think the solution is to find ways to make these issues new so they will get reported in the news. Get high-level politicians talking about them. Get universities and government agencies to issue reports. Get community groups and organizations to issue public statements. Together, we can do it!

Had these folks recognized their neighbor, this whole incident would never have happened.

Which is not to minimize the roles that race and class played in the scenario. They were both large, I believe, since they are both constructs that keep us from recognizing each other as fellow humans. And since attitudes about race and class are so often below consciousness, they tend come out unexpectedly and harmfully when we are placed in situations of extreme stress. Like a police officer confronting an unknown, apparently hostile person on unfamiliar territory. Or a person suddenly confronted by a police office in his own home.

But still, had neighbors known each other, that broken door would have been nothing more than an ordinary inconvenience.

The importance of community!

Historical oppression and slavery was a clearcut crime against clearcut victims, and African Americans today — no matter what pinnacle they have reached — cannot feel comfort in their achievements, or inner peace with this wretched society, despite having ostensibly thrown off the shackles that physically bound them.

But oppression and slavery of a different nature continue today, and have exacerbated and accelerated their grip. There is a psychological slavery that — under the surface — appears to do much less damage. But the reality is that this psychological slavery is doing more damage — indeed it was the driver of slave labor and the slave trade. It was the driver of countless massacres and wars and genocides. And it continues to be. It is the driver of resource wars in the Middle East and Africa, and the driver of ethnic strife, and the driver of our over-consumption, pollution, and resource-sucking ways.

Most of our species is beholden to a mythology of human transcendence above nature, and a sacred paradigm of economic growth at the center of our economic interactions. This economy — an increasingly globalized, fossil-fueled one, is sustaining us, for the time being. But it is inherently unsustainable. And we are starting to reach those physical limits.

The only viable response or solution is an ecological one — to find a way to quickly create a society in which incidents like the one that happened to Gates don’t happen because, like you said, we don’t have the time for it. If we don’t do it, the response will still be ecological… meaning that our species and countless others with it will get swept into the hands of planetary processes beyond our control. Our only chance at a just, sustainable future is to build it, because mother nature is reasonably blind to justice.