My Fellow Americans, Please Vote

We finally got to see An Inconvenient Truth this weekend, you know the "Al Gore Climate Change" movie.

In a word, the film was powerful. This says a lot coming from a person who spent the last 5 years in the communications department of an environmental NGO. I'm no stranger to the realities of climate change. But until this movie climatologists have been struggling to articulate not only the magnitude of the problem but also the urgency.

Bravo, Al! You did a fine job.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, seriously you must see it right away. Set aside whatever pre(mis)conceptions you may have about Al Gore, and open your mind for just 100 minutes to the possibility that up until the moment the lights go dim in the theater you are being dooped. Dooped by the Bush Administration, the oil and gas lobby, and the U.S. media.

Ask yourself why so-called "liberals" would make this shit up? There's no logic behind the hoax theory. If liberals really wanted to just waste away your tax dollars, we'd much rather spend it on healthcare and education. No one wants the mess we've inherited from generations of environmental abuse, but here we have it. A huge problem. It's not going way.

I think a lot about the kind of life my kids will have in this world. I sometimes seriously consider that even having kids would be completely irresponsible. We already have a host of geopolitical problems that aren't going to get better in our lifetime. Add to that the nightmarish reality of an ecological meltdown. It's truly scary.

In one scene of An Inconvenient Truth, Al shows graphics of what will happen if a big chunk of the terrestrial glacier in Greenland (and/or Antarctica) slides into the ocean. The resulting rise in sea levels would put most of Florida , quite a lot of Manhattan, and chillingly all of the Netherlands under water. Where do the 16 million inhabitants of an entire country go when their country ceases to be? What do you do when this scenario plays out all around the world? You think we have a big problem with illegal Mexican immigration? Pardon the pun, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Historically, wars are fought over the control of scarce resources. We all know the U.S. went into Iraq for the oil. You can't really blame us. We consume more per capita than any other nation in the world. We also need it more than anyone else b/c of the way we designed our cities and towns. We didn't know any better, and now we're a bit stuck.

But, imagine when the fight is for fresh water or rare tracts of land worth cultivating. What will our excuse be then? Can we morally justify taking a country to war for their underground aquifers? America and Australia stand with their heads in the sand alone. Where's our moral high ground when we are choosing to ignore the situation?

When you vote tomorrow, consider a few things:

A) I voted and it took a lot of extra effort to get properly registered from abroad. You have no excuse not to get out there and do it.

B) Who the fuck really cares if gay people want to get married? Can you live with yourself knowing that you kept a few gay men apart in your generation while your grandkids are fighting the great war for water?

C) Who the fuck cares if you save a few dollars in taxes in the next 4 years when the eventual cost of fresh food could mean that your grandkids may not ever afford to taste a fresh strawberry.

D) Who the fuck cares about Roe v. Wade when the future will likely bring mandatory abortions for everyone as we try to control rapid overpopulation.

F) What about the future? Do you care about the kind of world your progeny will live in?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't consider your own quality of life. But ask yourself how much the so-called "big issues" really even matter to you. Chances are they don't. At all. Not a single bit. America, we are allowing ourselves to be distracted by trivialities so that politicians can avoid dealing with the real problems.

Hold these monkeys accountable. Please vote.