Sounds like a routine emergency, just snake a tube down her throat, I'll be there in four or five hours.

Who can forget Dr. Beeper's flippancy in the seminal golf-as-life movie, 'Caddyshack': 'Sounds like a routine emergency, just snake a tube down her throat, I'll be there in four or five hours.'

Sadly, we, the people are the patient, our most dire straits, so perfunctorily addressed by a system of triage all too flawed to be simply laughed at or off.

And what underlying habitual behavior of humans, including those we routinely place in leadership, howsoever emotionally, lies at the root of this old dying tree of neglect?

To answer this query, let's travel back to the Reagan Administration, you remember, mourning in America, oops, make that 'morning in America.' (Notice that the 'U'/You was left out).

A person named Anne Gorsuch was EPA Administrator, her caricature appearing in a memorable syndicated political cartoon. She is sitting, arms folded at her desk, while a string of aides enter feverishly reporting on this environmental crisis and that, when she suddenly barks out at them all: 'Show me some dead bodies!'

Lest we focus all the blame upon our 'leaders', appointed, as she was, or routinely elected, let's quickly call to mind the reflexive, reactionary behavior known as 'rubber-necking' near a car crash, or 'fire-watching'. The ostrich should replace the logo of almost every emergency response entity, local, state, national, and especially international. While something like Philip K. Dick's fanciful crime prevention technological schema, however plausible in the future, assuming the Constitution's still alive and not fatally smothered in its hermetic case at the National Archives, prevention has always proven the best cure.

Cindy Morgan, Chevy Chase in Caddyshack

Until and unless we make that paradigm shift, however,the catchy slogan of these agencies, borrowed from 'Police Squad's parody, should appear underneath that already below-ground ostrich: "Nothing to see, move along", while an entire city block is consumed by 'x'.

What can we do about this? We, fellow ostriches (you know who you are), already know, or should.

Science, our new priesthood, has proven in the lab countless times that it takes about 21 days to replace a less desirable habit with a better one. Smoking, drugs, sex, almost any addictive behavior, including this 'after-the-fact' mentality, are no exceptions.

We need, then, a global intervention, to begin the process of evolution (slow but steady, with periods of punctuated equilibrium, but that journey of a thousand steps...you know)from all-too-human, the excuse, to humane, the destination we're wired for. That one little 'e', as suffix, is the fix, and the good kind. Yes, this sounds simplistic, even naive, but we must do what were able to, and we are able.

Otherwise, as with global warming, a fact from Joplin, MO to the Earth's poles, will force that evolution at great price. It's simply neither nice nor self-interested to mess with Mom Nature.

As the Buddhists are wont to teach us, patiently, habit of mind is the problem, our collective failure to recognize the true Nature of reality and its ultimate power. We are what we think.

Think humanely, it's natural, besides, Nature insists upon it.

Cindy Morgan, Chevy Chase in Caddyshack