The Age of Stupid....real stupid...
We have a choice - but we have to exercise that choice!
The Age of Stupid brings to mind Carl Sagan's elegant description of the nuclear arms race. It goes something like the following. The East and the West are locked in a room together. They are awash up to their waists in gasoline. With all their bluster, bravado, shortsightedness and lunacy they are arguing over who has the most matches. Sagan goes on to say, "Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would be an unprecedented human catastrophe." The Age of Stupid plainly illustrates we are on the edge of an environmental precipice, awash in gasoline, someone has already lit a match and we face a different but equally unprecedented catastrophe.
The tale of the pending ecotrastrophy is told as a docu-film. It utilizes sci-fi and sci-fact in the forms of conventional documentary methods as well as a fictional story that ties, seemingly, unrelated threads together. Those threads are the factual experiences of six very different people on the planet right now. Their individual stories could not be more different. But those differences illustrate the complexity and interrelatedness of us all.
Most documentaries offer up a dizzying array of facts that in the end become jumbled and so their importance is diminished. There are a lot of facts in this film - statistics that are frightening but unquotable. What are dizzying in The Age of Stupid are the extremes of people's opinions. Such as an idyllic community whose residents profess to be aware of and concerned about global warming and yet they resist (with deadly threat) the installation of wind turbines. Or the young African woman whose village suffers the results of violence and environmental contamination caused by an American oil company - all the while she yearns for the luxuries of America which would make life so sweet she would never want to leave the earth. There is the Shell Oil's paleontologist who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina who criticizes excessive consumption and yet vows he would do it all over again. The other stories are similarly conflicted.
The Age of Stupid is not a conventional movie. It's not a conventional documentary. It does predictably point fingers, but they point in every direction, often different directions at the same time. And so it seems difficult to grasp the point of the film. But that's exactly the point.
The film is concise in the vagaries of the issues. Each of us plays a part and each of us is conflicted. We know we shouldn't drive our SUVs, but then, industry hasn't provided us with workable or affordable options. We know we're facing a crisis but there is always contrary information from government or on-payroll scientists. We really don't want to purchase that plastic bottle of water in the theater but they won't let us bring in our own containers. We all have to live here but how can we do that responsibly with the systems, corporations, products and everything else flooding our lives?
I personally walked out of the film completely lost and feeling helpless. I had no idea my part in all this or what I could do. Then as I was walking to the parking lot, I passed a vacant restaurant for lease. The lights were all on and no one was home. I began to see. I began to feel outrage and empowerment. I took my environmentally damaging cell phone and called the leasing agent's number. I left an upbeat message and invited him to do his part for the planet and turn off the lights. And I won't stop there. I came away from this film not necessarily knowing what to do but knowing doing nothing will do nothing to ease the situation. I say to myself today, "do something, anything, act, speak up, act up if you have to - but do something, now!"
Someone lit the match in all this gasoline. It wasn't the oil companies or the corporations or governments or the entitled rich - it was each and every one of us. We fuel the fire in everything we do that requires fuel and in every choice of product that we make. Up to this moment we have been able to, with sure dumb luck and the efforts of a committed few, overt the nuclear winter Sagan warned us about. And right now in this moment we have the opportunity to dampen this fire that threatens to burn up the planet. After all, except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that global warming will be an unprecedented human catastrophe.
Note: This is a guest post by Frank Plughoff - Thank you Frank!