Live Earth

Not a lot of people in my circle of influence approached the Live Earth concerts like I did - most people listened or watched only a few minutes of it, if any at all. I started recording about 9 o'clock Friday night and continued, in one format or another, straight through till midnight Sunday night. In the course of it all, I discovered all sorts of great bands I had never heard before, and that's really what it was all about. I mean, I love Al Gore, but I'm not gonna listen to him talk all weekend. But the truth is there were three times the PSAs in between sets got me to stand up and change something in my life. Little things I could do easy enough, like unpugging the phone charger when I'm not using it. Or turning up the thermostat one degree. Of course, Rush Limbaugh reported one of the suggestions as only using two pieces of toilet paper.

And that's something that really sucks me off - the belittling by the far-right conservatives. As near as I can tell, the pro-global warming faction falls into two camps. One, those that think it's all a hoax perpetrated by liberals who want to pay more taxes. That group has shrunk drastically since Katrina. And B, those that say it's too big to do anything about - somehow, this seems to be where the converted from the first group fall. The thinking is since Kyoto and similar plans only help a little, they're not worth doing at all. Let's get just a slight bit of perspective here. Yes, it is only little things that each of us can do - the impact comes from the number of people doing them. And no, none of us can be perfect, but that's no reason to do nothing at all. There's a certain laid-back (and cute) Buddhist out there that's had me examining my views of hypocrisy lately, and ya know, maybe hypocrisy isn't always a bad thing. Maybe it's a start. I'm not talking about Bush vetoing stem cell research on the grounds that it's wrong to sacrifice one life to save others after overseeing record numbers of executions while governing Texas. That's not just hypocrisy, that's insanity. That's hearing voices in your head and saying it's God telling you what to do - God or a black lab, I get those two guys confused. But no, I mean the hypocrisy of me exercising every day but still loving McDonalds. The exercising me is where I want to go, the McDonalds me is where I am. If I waited till I didn't want fast food anymore before I started exercising, I'd never get anywhere. So maybe Madonna flew a private jet to do a benefit for the environment - although she didn't, she was already in town. Maybe Al Gore has a big house and it takes a lot of energy to heat it. Why point out the faults of others and never do anything for yourself?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no tree-hugger. I like to cruise Whole Foods parking lots and run over hippies - it's fun to watch them try to get the blood out of their cloth grocery bags with club soda. But you'd have to have a Texas education to not take this stuff seriously, and try to do something/anything, no matter how small.