I just watched An Inconvenient Truth tonight at a free "sneak peek" organized by Co-op America, Campus Progress and a few other progressive groups at D.C.'s E Street Theatre. The film was fantastically done, and enlightened me on several points about global warming that I wasn't aware of before. Good times. I encourage you all to see it.
     Then there was a little organized discussion afterward, which consisted mostly of several people from various progressive and enviro-friendly organizations talking up front about "how you can help" stop global warming.
     So then they opened it up to discussion, and I commented about how concerned I was that all the "solutions" being offered were really anti-social in nature. Things like "you can fill out this form on the website to send a message to ExxonMobil" and calling our congresspeople, and the upteen ways of saying "vote with your pocketbook:" save the environment by buying things! It was the same old song and dance of telling us consumers "buy certain things, and ask the powers that be to behave more nicely, and you're an exemplary activist." I said that over the past 50 years, as global temperatures have risen, organic communities have also decayed: if we fix the latter, it suddenly becomes much easier to fix the former. Socially atomized people are by definition can't act consciously in unison with others around them, which is exactly what must be done to help bring us all back from the brink.
     I told them that we all need to become more creative about our answers to the endless "well what can I do about it?" questions than using the same individualized and isolated actions used by the very system that gave us global warming in the first place. (Especially the one guy who works at a Solar Power PR firm: "we're selling green power like Coke or McDonalds!" What a stupendous analogy!) The panelists didn't really scramble to respond to me, and just let this one woman talk about how telling people to go see this movie is a social act, and can help create community. These were very much people thinking inside the political box (could you tell?). Though I can't really be surprised at the general inside-the-beltway thought processes, as we were after all, inside the beltway.

     So afterward I was talking to an older couple who it turns out are really active in the National Initiative for Democracy and former Senator Mike Gravel's Democratic Presidential run*. We had a lovely chat on the metro and we both exchanged ideas to look into. Such an encounter would not have happened had we all just left after the movie, which made me think: wouldn't it be fantastic to have movie theaters that set aside a place and some time after the movie, like in an adjoining room, where people could just go in and talk about what they just saw? Sure, it wouldn't be useful for movies like Legally Blonde 3, but for non-fluff films and documentaries I think it could be invaluable. Think of how fascinating it would be to join a post-movie discussion after every V for Vendetta showing, or even after a flick like Saw. It would turn what is otherwise the passive act -- sitting in front of a forty-foot screen -- into an engaging and socially rewarding event.


*Please don't construe this as an endorsement of either ni4d or Mike Gravel. Or of a hypothetical Legally Blonde 3, for that matter.