Tuesday, September 18, 2007

An Inconvenient Truth - Are you ready to change the way you live?

Friends,

This statement sums up the very famous and well-made documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring one politician I have always admired – Al Gore. I used the word “admired” because of the 2000 presidential elections. I had followed the elections closely, particularly the campaign speeches. Al Gore was the more flamboyant of the two candidates and was good at entertaining the public, but he lacked the steeliness that Bush exhibited in his speeches. Al Gore touched hearts, Bush stole their minds. And that made the difference. Of course, the fact that the Republican supporters are more evenly distributed among all states added to the Democratic defeat, it being only the 6th time in history that a candidate lost the elections inspite of grabbing a larger share of the popular vote.

The documentary was seen by many as a part of the supposed “campaign” for Al Gore’s nomination as a presidential candidate until he clearly stated that he was not going to throw his hat in the ring. And this point adds value to what he tried to do through this small but significant documentation of a problem which is too large to be measured using one documentary. He did it well, summing up all his experiences and in the process exposing some major loopholes in the Bush administration.

He did not just present facts in front of the public – facts that the public has been bombarded with all these years. He tried to disprove and support some of these facts. He showed what I mentioned in one of my earlier posts – that the media is too much of a powerful force in the present-day world. The point he made was that there is no “confusion” among the world’s leading scientists with respect to Global Warming – Almost all of them are in consensus that it is a real problem and not an imaginary one. It’s the media that has created the notion of a “big confusion”. The funda applied by them is: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of facts that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” And believe me, it worked pretty well. I, for one, was in a doubt. But after seeing all that is going on around me, I do not doubt the existence of this problem anymore.

The catchiest statement of his speech was the one which touched my heart (He is good at doing it!). It goes as follows: “We have everything we need, save perhaps political will. But you know what, in America; political will is a renewable resource.” And it’s the same with every Democratic nation in the world. Politics and come and go every 5 years, but we are here to stay. It is upto us to make the change. And I hope we make it real fast before the situation gets out of hand.

Mr. Gore tried to do his part in informing us and giving us all the details we need. All depends on us to actually see the facts and decide whom to believe – Mr. Bush and his aides or the entire scientific community.

Ciao.

No comments: