We went to see Al Gore’s global warming movie yesterday, An Inconvenient Truth. The movie was great and really laid out all evidence of global heating. Although I have seen and heard much of this evidence before, seeing it in one place really brings it home. One thing that concerned me going in was that the whole tone was going to be depressing and leave me feeling hopeless. On the contrary the final part of the presentation was a retelling of some of the amazing achievements of humanity to demonstrate what we can do. The point was that we have the capability to change our ways and maybe reverse this process. We just need the will to do it. The whole tone was one of hope rather than despair. Everyone should see this film. It is not perfect but it is very good. As I have said before, the earth will carry on. Species will go extinct and homo sapiens are one of them. Species have always gone extinct in the past and new ones have evolved to take their place. This has happened many times through the history of the planet. The big question is can be maintain the earth’s climate and ecosystems so that we can extend our time here? I believe we can but we need to work at it and change our behavior now.

One of the trailers we saw before the film was for a new documentary called The U.S. VS John Lennon. I hadn’t heard of this one before but it looks very interesting. It tells the story of the Nixon administration’s battle to have John Lennon deported because of his anti-war activities. It’s such a shame that we don’t we have a John Lennon among us today. Instead we are stuck with the likes of Bill O’Rielly and Anne Coulter. On the other hand, we do have this amazing communications medium of the internet. We have the capacity for millions of us to make our voices heard through blogs, podcasts, music, films and many other mediums. The thing we need to remember is that even in a democracy being in power is a corrupting influence. It has happened to people on all sides of the political spectrum, although corruption seems to bring out a particularly nasty streak in politicians on the right. This film appears to document the lengths that an administration went to silence one outspoken musician. It is a very important story to see in this time of NSA spying on Americans, people being locked up without charges or access to a lawyer, people being picked up from streets of foreign countries and transported to secret prisons for torture and other atrocities. Don’t forget that just because, or maybe especially if they keep bringing up God in their speeches it doesn’t mean that a politician should be trusted to protect your freedoms.

The one thing that makes the United States special is our constitution. Defend the constitution, without that you have no real freedom, and without that security really means nothing.