How my propaganda would be better than yours

One downside of no longer living alone is that when it's midnight, and you can't sleep, someone else IS asleep, and would probably be justifiably annoyed by your getting up and going to the kitchen to bake midnight ginger sparkle cookies. Even if ginger sparkle cookies are waaaay better than counting sheep for insomnia. Or, at least, they make you feel better about being awake.

This is true even if that person is partially to blame for said insomnia, having inflicted a climate-crisis-horror film on you after you spent the day researching environmental permits. In his defense, he meant well. It's definitely a mutual interest - usually environmental flicks are a place we can meet in the middle of the spectrum that runs between sex, 'splosions & slapstick (me) and artistic, deep, lovely, and torrentially boring art house films (him). However. I am developing some rules for myself as I get deeper into this whole environmental law thing; I think that one of them is going to be setting limits on how much exposure per day, and of what sort.

Tonight we watched "The Age of Stupid", and while I primarily agree with what it has to say, I didn't love the methods. For one thing, the thing feels like propaganda. I am fully in agreement with 99% of the scientists - climate change exists, and we're currently screwing ourselves. So, fundamentally, I am fully in agreement with the point of the film. But. If you are going do a documentary - and in spite of this films VERY clumsy "plot" of having one of the last remaining keepers of knowledge on earth going back through the news record leading up to the extinction of the human race, it is basically a documentary - you have to at least make an effort to present alternate points of view. There were none. All of the people doin' wrong were unpleasant, unattractive and unlikeable. . . and frequently fat. Further more, their only reasons for resisting changes were self-serving and small minded. All of the people either being victimized or trying to fix things were attractive and well spoken.

People. If this were actually the case the world over, I promise you, we would not be having the problems we're having changing behaviors. There are real issues that can make some blanket fixes extremely difficult. Giving fuel (heh. I kill me.) to the people who accuse liberals of making up climate change by making a film that doesn't take all the issues into account doesn't help anyone. (side note: why? why would anyone invent this? what is the benefit to the scheming liberal?) This film will resonate with people who are already convinced, and piss off the people who aren't.

Anyway (spoiler alert!) in the end, we all died in a gotterdamerung of fire and flood, drowning in blame for the deaths of our grandchildren; the old nimbys with their bad teeth along with the cute little family with the wind turbine and the chickens.

The movie did make one point I thought was interesting - our current inaction does seem a lot like a collective suicide on the part of the human race. The narrator asks why, after all this effort, we don't feel like we're worth saving. My answer, on sleep-deprived reflection, is that we have lost sight of the fact that individuals are all bits of a community; a single organism. Humanity thrives on balanced challenge within itself. The balance has been thrown off, and the cells are attacking each other. It's stupid, but we can't seem to stop. My mother would say there were devils in the house, trying to stop the next good thing from happening. It's not suicide, it's a disorder. Some kind of catastrophic imbalance. I think it's the blame game.

Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on the movie. I've been repelled by hellfire and brimstone sermons from the time I understood what they were, but some people get a lot out of them. I sort of prefer the carrot to the stick. My propaganda film: Here's how to make a totally healthy, tasty, nutritionally balanced vegetarian diet! Here's how to get to work without driving your hummer! Here's how to order just about anything you want environmentally friendly style! Here's how to use the great google to figure out how to do just about anything. (actually, I would just have to make a compilation of youtube videos) PS - if you fuck it up the first time, try, try again. Also, walk. Share space with other humans.

Finally - ginger sparkle cookies. Might save the world. (especially if you make 'em with brown sugar and white whole wheat flour)