OUR VIEW: Local warming

There was one delicious piece of irony during the three-hour Al Gore campaign commercial broadcast free of charge by the good folks at NBC over the weekend. It came during a performance by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame. Waters played “Another Brick in the Wall Part II.” The cameras cut to thousands and thousands of concert goers bobbing, nodding and singing along that “we don’t need no thought control.”
You just can’t make that sort of thing up. Professional cynics would be in heaven if the event wasn’t such a threat to our very existence.
You see a certain segment of the population has always been guilty of liking people only as an abstraction. As long as “people” refers to a mass, they love them, but when “people” become individuals, they hate them, or more appropriately hate us.
Consider the Live Earth blog from a member of that certain segment. “Our collective presence on a planet, all four billion plus of us, is simply too many people and when too many people drive too many cars, live too many lives, the earth is suffering,” wrote James Boyce from the press room at the New Jersey venue. Boyd was writing in anticipation of all the naysayers pointing out the hypocrisy of Gore, with his much-publicized and decidedly non-green Nashville home, the artists and their private jet traveling, tractor-trailer driving big old carbon footprinted entourages and the fans who from all reports traveled to the events not by public transportation or bike but by car, truck and, gasp, SUV and who once there quaffed copious amounts of beer from plastic cups.
We applaud Boyce for finally putting in words what so many of his kindred believe – that the world would be better off without so many of us. Next event, we hope he’ll go one step further and point out in even greater detail that what he means, really, is that the world would be better off without so many of “us.” Him? He’s fine.
He, who evidently would be one of the ones who gets to decide who among us is worthy to go about his daily activities on planet earth in some green dream future, wrote in his blog that those who attended the events, played at the events and staged the events will of course pollute, in the same way that professional sports game attendees pollute. He fails to point out that the professional sports game attendees don’t go to the game to point out how bad pollution is and polluters are. And that’s the point those in the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do community will never get. If it’s bad when “they” do it, it’s bad when “I” do it.
Proponents are saying that Live Earth was, of course, a polluting event. They say it had to be to reach the numbers it reached and raise so much awareness. OK. So who had their awareness raised? Doesn’t everyone already know? Didn’t they know from the last green movement back in the 1990s and before that the 1970s? (Although to be fair the cry was global cooling in the 1970s).
Somewhere back then someone, not Gore though he might try one day to take credit, coined the phrase “think globally, act locally.” It would have been good advice for Live Earth. It would have helped local economies, showcased local bands who don’t have those big carbon-smelling feet and wouldn’t have felt so doggone forced and slimy. There’s nothing more forced and slimy than a grassroots movement dictated from Washington, Los Angeles and New York.
But then again, had Gore and company thought globally and acted locally he couldn’t have gotten a three-hour campaign commercial free of charge from the good folks at NBC and we, the us they love to hate, wouldn’t have gotten to see thousands of people sing, with straight faces, “we don’t need no thought control.”