What happened is that an anger surfaced I could not quell. Quickened speech, inevitable slur or stutter, in the end, pure rant. They have AM talk shows that pay for this, I know, but my audience has been confined to my kids. 21st century kids. So where do you put a mother you can’t even listen to anymore?? In a blog…with media options to boot.
Today is July 17, 2008 and Al Gore is back in the news, making a speech about you know what, and a couple of weeks ago I finished Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call, and my heart’s aching. We could have had our attention forced in the direction of this calamity eight years ago and now we’re going to find ourselves lacking the proper amount of shock when salt water overtakes the pumps protecting terrestrials on Manhattan.
We all know this is happening…we know it. Any argument now is anachronistic. But what are we prepared to do? Leaders we chose fail to possess even our own common sense: it is as if we follow them thinking they will insulate us from the truth (which in their self-interest they gladly guarantee), but we still know it. We know it.
So Gore was addressing infrastructure attracting our tax dollars to create alternate energy systems and the jobs enough of us need. (You know when Manhattan goes soggy that futures trader will be standing behind you in the new step-up-to-get-some-employment line.) We could be drawing paychecks for what would feel like volunteer work. Volunteer work: stuff done for the greater good. What if your favorite nightly news program reported on federal tax dollars that weren’t wasted?
What Gore stresses, and what we know more than all the rest is that fossil fuels are killing us. And everything else that we may not care about but curiously drag our kids to the zoo to see. Fossil fuels, like every other resource Nature provides, are only benign when consumed in moderation.
“Ya can’t stop what’s comin’,” Ellis said to Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. But according to Gore, you can temper it.
And temper it we must.
We know it.