Hurrah for Andy Rooney

I’ve enjoyed Andy Rooney’s commentary for as long as I can remember. His highlighting of the obvious, his at-times cranky wit, and his ability to distill mountains into molehills has entertained and informed me since I was a child.
He rips into the heart of a matter when espousing his opinion of current events, taking the seemingly complicated and showing us that it’s much simpler than we make it out to be. It often is.
But he hasn’t hit the nail on the head this hard in a long time.
Some of you may have seen the 60 Minutes episode that aired April 12, 2009. Hopefully, you watched through to the end for Andy Rooney’s commentary. This post is for those of you who either missed it or just want a second dose of the healing powers of the obvious:

“I was reading the other day about what they called an ice bridge that’s twenty-five miles long in the Antarctic. This ice bridge, I called it an iceberg, broke. It was holding up another iceberg the size of Connecticut. I used to live in Connecticut, so that got my attention.
One picture shows a huge crack in the iceberg holding what amounts to one of our fifty states, and it’s frozen in place. Scientists say that if some of these big icebergs are lost, it could mean that the whole ice shelf itself could break up, and all that ice would have to go somewhere. I just hope it doesn’t come here.
This is what global warming does, though.
My grandfather once told me that we’re ruining the earth by using up all the good things on it and sooner or later we’re going to run out of them. He told me a lot of things I didn’t believe, but it turns out he was right in most cases.
The real question is, are we going to run out of the things we need before we find substitutes for them? You know we’re going to run out of oil, and we’re cutting down trees faster than we’re growing them, too.
It may be wrong to suggest impending doom, but if doom isn’t impending, it’s out there somewhere. If we don’t find replacements for all the good stuff on earth that we’re using up too many of too fast, doom is what we’re facing.
If running out of oil doesn’t scare you, maybe an iceberg the size of Connecticut floating away from Antarctica and hitting the United States’ll get your attention.
A lot of people think we should just use everything we have because things’ll work out. Their attitude is, we can always pump more oil, chop down more trees, mine more coal.
A lot of people, called conservationists, want to save the forests and reduce our use of coal and oil before we run out of those. I personally am a conservationist who uses a lot of oil and trees. I mean, I’m our problem.”

-Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes, April 12, 2009.