I just watched An Inconvenient Truth, and, while I was feeling that sense of compulsion, that ABILITY TO ACCOMPLISH that one often feels after watching a powerful movie, I wanted to blog about it while I still felt in touch with it.
I was excited today by posting the first part of my conversation with Aki, because it marked a change. For a while, now, with the exception of one or two early posts, my posting to this blog has been mostly linking to other sites with information that I either found engaging, entertaining, angering, or something. But I was rarely expressing opinions of my own outside of expressing my reaction to some of these sites... I have fallen away from posting out of a sheer desire to express a personal opinion!! For this, I am sorry.
When Bush was re-elected, I had intended to not go to classes, and sit out in one of the quads with a sign that said something.... something minimalistic, expressing my disbelief, my outrage, something. And I was going to sit next to that sign in silence. I was not going to speak, I was not going to eat, I was not going to move. I was going to sit there all day. I was DRIVEN TO ACTION by an event that moved me significantly.
I didn't do any of that, though. And I regret it.
Seeing An Inconvenient Truth moved me in much the same way... I have the intense desire to accomplish something, to make changes IMMEDIATELY to my lifestyle that will not only change my impact on the environment, but that will impact people AROUND ME in the hopes that THEY TOO will be driven to action... desire to change themselves and those around them. It is infectious, sometimes, when lots of people get together and they start making changes to themselves, to each other, and sometimes something exciting or beautiful comes out of that.
We get mired a lot in a sense of mundaneness, and our force of habit. We cease to see the things around us that are good and that came from lots of people, or even just a few people, banding together to make a change. As Americans, we have both the right and the privilege of being able to express ourselves to each other in public or private, no matter what those views are. And I am often skeptical of how long that right and privilege will be around, given contemporary political trends... but we have it, for the time being. And we need to use it.
I pledge to try to express my opinions more often to you, and I also pledge to try to show you the way more often, the way toward accomplishing things. I'm going to put links in the side panel to websites that help you take simple, immediate action.
I pledge to stand out in the Ithaca Commons once a month and stand on a box to tell the world what I have done for it, and to show people just how easy it was so that they might realize that they can do it, too.
In My Opinion, there is nothing greater than the force of an individual, both mind and body. I have the power to make a difference. We all have the power to make a difference, in a way that is not at all contrived. While we are all insignificant in the scale of the universe, the globe, even the city we live in, it is when we impact those around us in a strong enough way that we can set about a chain reaction. Just as the automobile was invented and changed the way countless people around the world travel, so too can I, or a group of people, bring about attention and awareness that changes how the entire world population treats the environment.
I pledge to change myself and others.
But I want to ask for a pledge from you, too. I want you to link people to my website when you think that I have something good to say that they ought to hear. I want you to send them to my website and the websites in the side-panel. The internet is a phenomenal tool that helps in the easy spread of positive infection, in awareness, and in action. With just a few clicks of a mouse, you can change someone's life, and change the world.
The change doesn't start with me, it starts with US.
www.climatecrisis.net
Labels: An Inconvenient Truth, change, Global Warming
