As most of you know who suffered through my endless posting of All Things Tester this election cycle (as well as my overwrought election liveblogging), I care a lot about issues. I vote, read the news voraciously, and actually attempt to achieve at least a rough match between the principles I yammer on about and my life.
Which is why it's surprising that I did not view An Inconvenient Truth until two nights ago. Truth is, I only have so much stomach lining, people, and I just knew that if I watched that film before the election, the acid would chew clean through it. I already know it's a huge problem, I told myself, so why do I have to go and scare the bejesus out of myself even further?
Plus, I knew it would make me nostalgic for Al Gore, for whom my adoration eclipses even that which I hold for Jon Tester. Damn it, I went to bed election night 2000 thinking our country might survive and even flourish, and three weeks later Warmonger G was the President-elect. That hurt.
But recently Mr. T and I have been lately having discussions about the future involving those nettlesome questions about matching principles to practice, and I realized I needed Al's backup. Mr. T was a geologist and environmental consultant before he became a bidnessman, and so he has a perfectly good sense of climate disruption and the human cause of it, but it was still too much an abstraction. In the course of these chats, I mentioned AIT.
"So let's see it," he urged.
And we did. Whew. To say it's compelling is somewhat less than adequate. The film so deftly strips away the abstractions of global warming and sets forth, in plain and stark relief, the moral imperative. There are parts of the film where even the knowledgeable Mr. T gasped. But you leave hopeful; Gore outlines, in graph form, all the changes that will ratchet down the warmth of the planet. This one's a life changer.
As a result, you'll probably be seeing more posts here about this issue.
Roger Ebert wrote, in his review of An Inconvenient Truth:
In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.If you haven't seen it yet, see it. You really sort of owe it to the world.
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