The choice of life on one hand and death on the other is sometimes hard to make.....

The Henny Penny ‘Sky is falling’ crowd won’t quit until the USA becomes a 3rd world country…

Before the cheap energy of coal and oil, America was pretty much one great big farm…well, a big farm with most of the acreage unused because it was too arid or too wet, too rocky or too mountainous….you get the picture, don’t you?  

Americans had more freedom to move about than did the people in most of the rest of the world but our life spans didn’t differ much. If you survived childbirth and adolescence, your teeth became pretty much history in your 30's or 40's, restricting your diet after which you quickly got old and died.

Boys and girls came of age in their very early teens, married and had children of their own, well except for those that died stillborn.  If they made it through their first year, it was still a battle for most of them to make it all the way to adolescence.

And those girls that were able to complete the cycle died either in childbirth or from the physical debilitation that came from just too many pregnancies.  It is not at all uncommon when visiting old burial sites to find that many men had multiple wives.  Children, after all, were a source of labor. Of course, I’m still talking about pre-cheap energy days when men were old in their forties ’n fifties, revered for their age.

But, this ‘new’ land had resources beyond it’s vast forests. It had coal. An abundance of coal to fire the factories, to heat the homes. Why, that very abundance of coal helped to save some of the forest that once blanketed the USA from the great Mississippi River to the rocky coast of Maine. 

And then, there was oil. First, from Pennsylvania where they’re still pumping out cheap energy. Later, from Oklahoma and Texas and…wow of wows, California. Other oil and coal deposits, of course, all around this bastion of freedom for the world.

Coal, oil and natural gas fueled the great immigration of peoples from around the world, holding the promise of freedom and prosperity for all, regardless of color or creed.

Oh, and the cheap energy doubled the life span, not only of Americans, but those of other countries as well because as most capitalists are aware, prosperity breeds prosperity.

And, little Susie ’n Samuel, that’s how your great-great grandparents made this country, indeed this world, a safer, better place where you could march for Greenpeace and clean energy!