John Hawkins

The reason people who are knowledgeable about our nation’s history are so concerned with following the Constitution, sticking to traditions, and safeguarding our rights is that our country's success is not the rule. For all the bitter railing you hear against "1%ers," if you're living in modern day America, you are one of the 1%ers. That’s because 99% of the people in human history haven't had it as good as you do. To the contrary, the lives of most humans who've lived on this planet could be fairly summed up with Thomas Hobbes’ famous phrase, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Maybe we should consider that and stop taking all the good things we've achieved as a result of our Constitution, our culture, our religion, and traditions for granted.

1) We shouldn't take access to cheap oil for granted: "There are relatively few large sources of oil. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates combined account for 60% of the world’s oil reserves. Imagine a couple of very plausible scenarios occurring at the same time — perhaps a war between Israel and Iran along with a civil war in Saudi Arabia. If that were to happen, you could easily see the price of oil double or even triple overnight with no easy fix." This would be of minimal consequence if we were actually harnessing our own resources. We have enough oil offshore and in shale to "fuel every passenger car in the nation for 430 years." Unfortunately, because the government is working overtime to prevent these resources from being taken out of the ground, if we had a real crisis and gas reached the $10-$15 range, we'd have to suffer through those kind of prices for up to a decade while the oil industry caught up to where it should already be. That’s something we wouldn’t have to worry about if we had our priorities in order instead of catering to environmental extremists who won't be happy until we all live like the Flintstones.

John Hawkins
