Inconvenient things

If Al Gore would decide to run for president again, I think my vote would be decided easily.  According to this Times article, he says has no intention to run, despite a group of his former supporters campaigning to bring him out.  Gore lost his first campaign for president for lots of reasons (even before it was stolen from him), some of them being the way he wasn’t as jovial and charming to people on camera, the way he couldn’t talk animatedly, and how everytime he tried to make a joke it never really came off. 

This happens to lots of candidates.  The media has already started making fun of them.  Some of them deserve it because they say ridiculous things.  But I always get offended by the jabs directed at people not due to the content of their words but because of an awkward delivery.  So Al Gore couldn’t play the saxophone like Clinton.  So he’s no cowboy from down home on the ranch.  But he’s serious and sober and considers the world’s problems with his heart and his mind and with not just his own interests or his nation’s interests in mind, but the world’s.  If you watch his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, you’ll see how remarkably charismatic he can be.

One of the problems, I’ve always thought, with the first Gore campaign was that his speech writers and “gesture directors” (you realize they have these) all were trying to keep him in pitch with Clinton, the great seducer (and what a seducer he was, ahh, brings back memories).  If they’d been smart, they would have allowed Gore to be himself more, rather than trying to suit him up in the fun party guy’s self-presentation.  But probably even then he wouldn’t have got popular, because Americans weren’t ready to hear what needs to be done if we want this world to survive.  It would get in the way of every way we live right now.

The title of Gore’s documentary couldn’t be more apt.  It is an inconvenient truth we’re faced with in the world right now.  Pretty much all of the ways we live will have to be changed if we want a healthy world to live in.  And no one, really, admit it, likes to change.  Especially when it costs money.  But I can’t imagine not doing so, considering the other option: continuing ruining the earth’s atmosphere and resources until it’s an unlivable place for anything.  They say we have time, though; if we started soon, we could turn back the processes of pollution.  I think that would be something the whole world could get behind, though I assume there would be someone trying to make a shady buck off of that, too.  Even so, if it would lead to a livable world, it’d be worth it.