The future of this nation depends, more than anything else, on our energy policy going forward. Continuing to import foreign oil and natural gas has made us so dependent on other countries that they have become less than sympathetic to our needs and no longer willing to rely on our leadership. Continuing to use coal for the majority of our electrical needs will pollute our air and water to the point that life will become miserable in the very near future. Our fish and drinking water are already so compromised that consumption of or those things is dangerous to life and health in parts of the country already. This can only spread throughout the country and will do so faster than people realize. The mining of oil, coal and natural gas all involve workmen to risk their lives and compromise their health in order to support their families. Building huge wind farms is a logistical nightmare and having personal wind turbines in our back yards causes not just logistical problems but quality of life conflicts in neighborhoods. Replacing gasoline with alcohol is a boondoggle and costs drivers more in the long run because it reduces miles per gallon. This leaves only two sensible energy alternatives for the consumer. Solar panels and biodiesel. In fact, plain vegetable oil could easily replace even biodiesle with a minor change to diesel engine design. The most sensible and cheapest way to produce vegetable oil for fuel is to build greenhouses to grow algae. This is more practical and space-saving than producing oil from corn or other field grown crops and far less expensive. Until very recently, solar panels were out of the reach of the average homeowner because of their cost. Now, however, it is possible to have solar panels on our houses without buying them. There is a company in California that has begun leasing solar panels to home owners at no up-front cost and an affordable monthly payment. There are several advantages to this business plan for the consumer. The cost of energy is constant from month to month and does not change with the seasons or with the vagaries of the weather. Power lines going down in a storm or because of a traffic accident is not an issue. Power blackouts because of over consumption will be a thing of the past. Parents do not have to worry about their families being asphyxiated in their beds at night. Moreover, the costs per month will be less than buying energy from conventional power companies. Installation and maintenance are the responsibility of the company that we lease from. Millions of permanent, well paying jobs would be created. We could stop subsidizing the oil and gas industries and close down dangerous coal mines that violate safety regulations and destroy the environment. The only thing standing in the way of having this go nation wide is the cost of solar panels produced in the United States and the shortage of panels produced in other countries. (China is already producing twice as many panels as the US and at half the price.) I will discuss this issue in part II tomorrow.

I realize that many people, unlike me, are not in favor of single payer health care, what many call socialized medicine. Some even believe that it smacks of Socialism. Whatever your personal preference the need for health care reform was brought home to me yesterday in a very personal and painful way. My young granddaughter apparently swallowed an earring. It became lodged in her intestine and required emergency surgery to remove it because it was causing bleeding and damaging her colon. She had the surgery and twenty-four hours later she had not awakened from the anesthetic. The doctors told her father a story that I know could not be true as to why this happened and the truth will eventually come to light but the point I want to make here is that the doctors told her father that there was so little brain activity that there was virtually no possibility that she would ever wake up and that she was technically brain dead. The were determined to take her off life support and allow her to die. Fortunately, her father is a wealthy man and was able to bring in a specialist within three hours. The specialist gave my granddaughter an injection of a new drug and within two minutes she was wide awake and asking for her barney doll. If my son were not a wealthy man and had to rely on his insurance alone his daughter, my granddaughter, would be dead. It became very clear to me at the moment that I heard the details of the events that money determines life or death in the American medical system. As long as insurance companies can determine the amount of coverage you can have you are at risk. How much coverage you can get depends on other variables as well and many are denied any coverage because they have had illnesses in the past or because they are at risk to develop illnesses in the future due to occupation or lifestyle.

I realize that there will never be a time when everyone in America can have the security of knowing that they can have the best of health care available as my son has because of his wealth, but many have such limited coverage or no coverage at all that they are constantly under threat of suffering or death without even having access to basic health coverage. Clearly this is just wrong. Your life should not be subject to your level of income or circumstances beyond your control.

I have not been happy with everything President Obama has done and even more unhappy with what he has failed to do. His announcement in the Sate of the Union address last night that he will work with Congress to end the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy has come late and will require the attention of the President as well as the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State (who created this mistake in the first place) to come to fruition. I do not foresee this President making any attempt to legalize Gay marriage or to make any more progress on Gay Rights issues. Even so, I believe that the failure of the Obama Presidency would be disastrous for the country. The failure of the first black presidency brought about by mostly old white men would create a divide in the country wider than any since the Civil War. Both the Democrats who need to face the issues with courage and logic and stop worrying about being re-elected and the Republicans who now have no excuse for not creating a scenario in which the President can succeed.

This country is in desperate need of jobs, healthcare reform, an energy policy that makes sense for the future, an effective education policy, a foreign policy that will make the world safer and restore American leadership on the world stage. I believe that President Obama is on the right side of all these issues and it is up to members of the Gay Community to put ourselves in positions where we can help him formulate policies that will be effective and improve the lives of Americans and the people of the whole world. One way to do this is to run for public office as Independents. It is not even necessary to always win these elections. The simple act of running will allow us to get our positions heard by the public and I think that we might be very surprised at how many of these races we actually will win as long as we are perceived as caring about all of the issues that effect the lives of the average person and not simply LGBT people.

The failure of the first black president would make it nearly impossible for any minority individual to be seriously considered for the Presidency for a very long time to come and could result in violent upheavals that would shake the very foundations of American Democracy and jeopardize Democracy worldwide.

President Barack Obama is expected to talk about the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” rule that bars openly gay Americans from serving in the military during his State of the Union address this week, a senior lawmaker said on Monday.

I am not about to go ga-ga because President Obama will touch on this topic. I am not satisfied that at this late date  Congress has decided to form a committee to discuss the issue. There is nothing to discuss as far as I am concerned. There is no valid reason to deny openly gay men and women the right to serve their country. If the President were serious about changing the policy to give us equality and full citizenship he could simply do so with the stroke of a pen. In a time when military veterans are being given preference in hiring for government subsidized jobs it is completely unfair to deny these opportunities to a huge segment of Americans because of their sexual preference.

The LGBT community has to wake up and realize that we do not have to stand by powerless and begging on issues that effect our lives. We have to power to elect or deny election to anyone in this country simply by supporting or withholding full fledged support. At this point we have no choice but to wait for a Congressional committee to make a decision but we can determine the outcome ourselves simply by contacting our Senators and Congressmen and informing them in no uncertain terms that we will never again give them our support if they deny us our rights and that we will not wait for a long and drawn out hearing that sees us lied about and degraded publicly. Since they have already decided to do this by committee it must be done quickly and cleanly with the full support of the Democratic side of the isle or we will refuse them our support in the 2010 elections. If we withhold our support they cannot be re-elected. The situation demands that the LGBT community come together to act in unison on this and other important issues. If we do not, we have no-one to blame but ourselves.

My name is Jack Crain. I am a sixty-three year old gay man living in southeast Louisiana. I have spent my adult life since the late 1960s as an activist for equality in racial and gay rights issues. In all that time the only place to go for help has been the Democratic Party. In the area of Gay Rights very little has been accomplished except around the edges of American society. Important issues like protection from discrimination in hiring, safety in the streets, marriage, freedom from religious influence to protect our progress toward equality and many other important issues that affect the pursuit of our happiness have taken a back burner to political considerations. The time has come, and it is now possible because of the progress that we have made, for the LGBT community to stand on its own feet and to realize that we cannot rely on sympathetic friends in Washington, including the President, to make a priority of securing true equality for us. We have to begin doing it for ourselves. That’s what this blog will be all about. Discussing the ways that members of the Gay Community can gain full citizenship as Americans; how we can finally establish equal protection under the law; how we can make a difference for ourselves and stop relying on politicians who will throw us under the bus in order to secure their own re-election. I hope many people will join me in this effort and I look forward to your feedback on the issues that will be discussed.

Step one: run for local office and be OUT!