We have met the enemy and he is us.

—Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo

NEEDHAM. Mass. The environmentalist T-shirt company says, “Life is Good” but really, in political terms, life is just a little too good for too many people in America. Are we really solving the dire problems of the world by driving hybrid SUVs to shop at Whole Foods three times a week? Yes, it’s a green recyclable bag, but the fruit and fish needed a complex exploitive global economy to be collected and tons of smelly jet fuel to get here from Chile, only then to be tossed out on a whim after the expiration dates.

Money is seemingly everywhere, except in our savings accounts, and especially our government’s treasury, where we continue to rack up the national debt by vast income transfers to the not-so-innocent sovereign-wealth funds held by the emir of Dubai and other fossil-fuel luminaries.

We’re encouraged to spend now, and save less, but miraculously are entitled to more later. We’ve been through a costly war that the general public supported through retail sales at Bloomingdales, and here we go again into yet another presidential election.

The phrase that Ronald Reagan pinned on Jimmy Carter, “There he goes again,” should now be the political-T-shirt slogan for the American people, of both parties. “There we go again.”

In polls and focus groups we say that there are dire economic, environmental and political problems that call for drastic change, but politicians want to get elected, and people don’t want to pay more taxes.

So the charade of T-shirt change continues. We want change, but we don’t want to change. Progress is demanded, but sacrifice isn’t.

Where is the candidate at the Brandenburg Gate calling for sacrifice from the American public? We know it, and now we need to hear it from our leaders. Life is too good.

Yes, your personal trainer recommends drinking a lot of water — it’s good for you — but sacrifice requires that you drink it from a tap, not from a plastic bottle with a pretty picture of a pine tree on it. Gasp. Yes, cheap oil is good for you, and our economy, but too much of it is bad for the Olympic bicyclists, and it also funds the tyrants and terrorists of the Middle East.

The problems of America are not the government’s fault. The main fault is with the American people, unchallenged by ambitious politicians, who would rather win now than govern well later.

What we need is the political party and politicians that promise the least. We need the speech that challenges us, and bumper stickers not on the rear of our cars but in front of our faces.

— Chip Benson