I recently had to quit my job at Braum’s in Webb City.

I was working part-time while still maintaining a full-time school schedule, working an internship for The Joplin Globe and working for The Chart.

A good factor in this decision was stress, but a related problem had recently arisen: the cost of gasoline to get back and forth to work and school from my apartment in Alba had trumped whatever wage I was earning there.

It wasn’t such a matter when the hours were easier to hand out and gasoline wasn’t teetering on $5 a gallon.

The economy of this country is in turmoil, and the structure of most communities is obscenely detrimental to our resources.

It’s not so much a hippy ideal any more.

The green movement is making some ham-fisted attempts at rectifying the situation here, but the reality is that we have become so heavily dependent on forms of fuel and inefficient transport that we have worked ourselves into a rhetorical and spiritual quagmire.

At some point in time we are going to have to wake up from this comatose state and actively seek solutions to the problems we’re facing.

We’re able to communicate easily in this day and age.

We can communicate across broad swaths of land and sea.

The common man is informed, yet seized with an apathy so powerful that it keeps him from knowing how or when to act.

Something has to give. Something has to change.

Until people wise up to the fact that we don’t have to indulge simply because we have the option, we’re going to continue working ourselves into new lows until there’s nothing left to degrade.

It’s going to take discipline, inquiry, and a lot of faith in your cause.

It’s going to take kindness, but most of all it’s going to take courtesy.  

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my time here, it’s that if we’re ever to change anything in this world, it’s going to require courtesy.