Sherry Chandler

We’re in trouble. Our ice caps are melting. Polar bears are drowning and or becoming cannibals. We have floods in Houston, drought in Darfur, New Orleans is a ruin, forests are burning in Arizona and all over the southern hemisphere.

Al Gore wants us to tighten our belts and do something about it. This has been the Democratic message ever since Jimmy Carter. Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, even Bill Clinton, wanted us to tighten our belts and take care of one another. But Americans have preferred the Republican message: Don’t worry. Be happy. Shop like there’s no tomorrow.

Well, our tomorrows are in short supply. But I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll listen to Gore.

Al Gore has aged. He’s got a suspicion of a little tonsure-like bald spot. He’s heavy, puffy even, his fingers thick. And he’s still stiff and earnest, somewhat clumsy in his attempts at humor.

But he’s also what I think a leader should be: intelligent, informed, and passionate, with real plans for solving real problems. He has handled a crushing defeat with a great deal of grace. He’s an ex-tobacco farmer, has worked in those hot gummy fields, and his tobacco barn is as delapidated as ours. He is the president we might have had. The president we elected. The grief of that loss made even deeper the grief I felt seeing what we’ve done to our planet.

I have seen “An Inconvenient Truth” described as a campaign bio-pic and if it is, then good. We need Al Gore right now, who doesn’t have to be timid because he has nothing to lose.

Whether he runs for President or not, we need him. We need real leaders. Statesmen.

We need farmboys, not cowboys.

Surely the country is hungry for this.

But I fear not. I’m worried that the Bush years have not energized the American people, but made them more cynical, less engaged. I am worried about turnout, which was 30ish per cent in California to elect a replacement for Duke Cunningham, and something like 4% in the Virginia primary — on a sunny day.

I am very worried.

Update: from the Lexington Herald-Leader for June 20, 2006:

A study from a national research group says Kentucky is among the top 10 states where carbon dioxide emissions, a primary global warming pollutant, more than doubled in 41 years.

In the report, titled “Carbon Boom,” Kentucky ranks No. 7 with an increase of 98.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from 1960 to 2001, a 209 percent increase. Texas ranks No. 1 with an increase of 427.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions, according to the United States Public Interest Research Group.

Al Gore on Charlie Rose. Via Atrios.

We spent our Father’s Day afternoon at the Kentucky Theater watching An Inconvenient Truth. It was a stunning experience on several levels, one that left me uncharacteristically speechless.

For right now I want to say only this: Go see this film. It will show you some things you need to see.

For my local readers, it has two days left at the Kentucky.

Though we ate them over ice cream for Father’s Day.

Wild raspberries are making a comeback on the place. During most of the years of our boys’ growing up, we had canes enough for a couple of pies or some jam. But then drought and the more aggressive blackberries destroyed nearly all of them. Though they are wild and grow where they will, we have tried to protect them a certain amount of space, to let them have the space they choose, and this year they are paying us back.