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An Inconvenient Truth: Two years later

It has been two years since An Inconvenient Truth was released. These were my thoughts on it after seeing it for the first time:

I had a front row seat in a packed theatre to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth last night. I can describe it in two words: a journey. It is Al Gore's journey of heart, soul, spirit, and mind through a lifetime of stewardship and also growth. For as much as this movie is a clarion call to all of us to now take our own journey for our planet, ourselves, and our children, it is also Al Gore's reckoning with himself. He lays his soul bare to warn us of the consequences of our inaction now regarding this crisis, because it relays to the events in his own life in the past that brought him to this point as well.

The scenes showing his early years in Congress, his son's car accident, the 2000 election (yes, I cried here,) and the very poignant scenes of him with his sister Nancy who died of lung cancer revealed to me a man not doing this out of any selfish political intent, but of a man who is telling you, the viewer, that even he has had to experience loss and near loss in his life in order to realize what he lost and how much of a part he played in it. I think those scenes were shown in direct correlation to this climate crisis and his message that we must not make the same mistake now with our planet.

Will we look back years from now regretting that we continued the very behavior that is contributing to this crisis even knowing what it is doing to our planet? Or will we take the necessary steps to change our ways and heed the warnings before it is too late? That is the question of this movie and there is no alarmism whatsoever in the presentation of the solutions we have at our disposal. Mr. Gore relays the facts starkly, calmly, and at times humorously, and clearly lays out what we can do to mitigate this crisis. And the scientific consensus cannot be denied that we as a species are contributing to it and it is having a definite effect on our world.

His statistics on Co2, invasive species, species loss, ice cap melting, population growth, etc., intertwined with footage from around the world showing the effects of the statistics he showed was all very well presented and backed up. I also never got the impression that any of this is about him in any other sense than him using himself as an example of someone who had to reach the bottom in order to reach for the top.

I laughed, I cried, and I saw before me on the screen a man who has surely come full circle with who he is and what his mission is, and that is handing that mission and truth to us. He says he is not a hero, and frankly, I didn't see a hero in this movie and that is a good thing. Heroes have a tendency to be placed on pedestals and forgotten. I saw something much more. I saw a prophet, a missive, and a trailblazer who has full faith in our abilty to save our planet. And we must not let our planet down, and that also includes those in government and the corporate world whose indifference to this issue can no longer be tolerated.

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