This is cross-posted (though amended, revised, and extended) from my home website, nodepression.com
Finally, on the eve of the inauguration of president Barack Hussein Obama, we sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth. For a period of time in the 1980s-'90s, I found bits of writing work as a film critic, which enabled me to see — for free, of course — 100-150 movies a year.
And then I moved to Los Angeles, where, while it is reasonable also to make jokes about the making of sausage and legislative bills, the truth is I worked too much and networked too little, and fell out of the habit of watching. And then to Nashville, where there is precious little film culture, and now to a small town in Eastern Kentucky, where we just got our first multiplex.
Along the way we had a little girl, now moving inexorably toward being 6 years old (or 16, depending), which means that while I am not exactly a connoisseur of Pixar's products, I am conversant.
This is not, quite, why we took so long to see An Inconvenient Truth. We -- like most readers here -- are the converted: We have planted an orchard, changed out our lightbulbs, taken to walking and riding our bicycles to work when possible. It has been many years since last I read Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, but I read it several times in the 1970s, and no matter how discredited or forgotten it may be, the point is simply taken that a planet which once hosted 2 billion humans is now about to host 9 billion of us, and there is a cost associated with that growth. James Howard Kunstler's Long Emergency rang true for me, in parts, as well, a reminder of things I have always known and long ignored.
(It is a curious thing that both the ecological left and the religious right seem almost to hunger for a post-apocalyptic endgame. I continue to believe this is a quest for certainty, a need for a black and white world expressed both in the rhetoric of the Bush II Presidency and in the gospel music of, say, Como Now and Singing Songs Of Praise by the Spiritulaires Of Huntsboro, Alabama, both recent and obscure albums to which I am drawn and to which I have sought to draw the attention of readers. A rejection of the gray haze from which something like the truth might actually emerge.)
An Inconvenient Truth was assembled in film form well before the U.S. and world economies went into their present tailspins. It was Al Gore's best shot – a highly successful one, if commerce and accolades count, and maybe they do – at making the case that we are heedlessly, haplessly, helplessly changing the world ("Won't you please come to Chicago" echoes, here) to our collective doom. It was a powerful attempt to inject the subject into our political discussion.
And yet our most recent election was not about global warming, no matter how few millions among us were energized by that concern. It was about race, and the race to war, torture and the torturing of public truths, and, ultimately, it was about the economy and management style.
The science remains, and it was encouraging to hear President Obama speak to the return of science and rational discourse during his inauguration. We can argue about its interpretation, about the urgency with which our actions will be necessary, about the severity of its impacts. We can put off the discussion.
The science remains.
My daughter is not yet 6. What world do we leave her?
We spend our energies seeking to connect to each other: text-messaging and twittering and facebooking and blogging and maybe even talking on the phone, occasionally, in person. There was a movie in the mid-'80s, Koyaanisqatsi, a beautiful essay built around stop-motion photography and somewhat new-agey contemporary music, the name taken from a Hopi Indian word said to mean "life out of balance." It, too, was a kind of success, but few chose to act upon its lessons.
The present economic collapse makes possible and reasonable a collective seizure of fear and loathing. It makes reasonable the abandonment of any kind of long-term planning and responsibility, for people are out of jobs and hungry.
It is also the moment of our last, best hope.
In the rush to put people back to public works, let us not invest in the infrastructures of the past, but in the future. Because even if one wishes to debate the details behind the science of climate change...even if one wishes simply to deny the science...it is still in our best interests to take the steps advocated to reduce our impact on this lonely blue marble.
We can reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and decrease our interdependence on foreign powers whose needs and agendas are quite necessarily different from ours. And we can quit destroying our mountains and any other place coal might be found.
We can reduce our consumption of energy, and of the plastic landfill sold by WalMart and made in China. This will create jobs retrofitting our houses, and making more durable toys (for adults and their children) on our own shores, out of, dare one hope, sustainable components.
We can return to the habit of mindfully making things for ourselves. The bean counters and marketeers have convinced us that it is a better use of our time to allow slave labor abroad to grow our vegetables and glue together our sport shoes, but they are wrong and their conclusion is ethically unsustainable. It makes us weak, and dependent upon their products.
It makes them too big to fail, and we have seen how that works.
James McMurtry sang "We Can't Make It Here". We bought my wife a spinning wheel for Christmas. We can make it here. We will make it here.
Yes, it will take longer, and we'll get it wrong for a while until we get it right. That's OK.
We have come to be in a hideous hurry, racing to hear or see the next big thing before it's over, racing through the streets to the next new fast-food restaurant because we haven't time to pack lunch, nor the will to stay in our office to eat it...because too many jobs suck, and only a fool would quit to do something else in this economy.
It is possible to live another way. It is possible to talk to your neighbors instead of depending upon text messages from afar for human contact. It is possible even to help your neighbors when you disagree about politics and religion, child-rearing and which Led Zeppelin album is best.
I write this at the dawn of the administration of president Barack Hussein Obama. He is our last, best, and only chance. Either we get this right now, or we fail, utterly. Either we make the hard choices now, or we face a very hard and ugly end not too far at the end of this blind road. Either we collectively make this civilization work, or it collapses of its own grotesque weight.
This is our choice.
It is our duty.
I have been reading David Hackett Fischer's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Washington's Crossing, which focuses on the winter campaign of 1776-77 that made possible the independence of these United States. Last night, after watching Al Gore's presentation, I ran onto this:
"Dr. Benjamin Rush...thought it was a national habit of the American people (maybe all free people) not to deal with a difficult problem until it was nearly impossible. 'Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity,' Rush wrote. 'We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.'"
I hope Dr. Rush was right.