To the Editor,
Re: Reality demands public participation, Saturday Beat, Oct. 29.
My Saturdays are usually tame stuff, but the Saturday Beat marvellously roused me from my slumber, primed my brain to think and provoked a letter.
The choice of pills in The Matrix as carnal knowledge or antidote to reality is true cinema vision.
Hollywood rarely asks us to think about the picture. I don’t recall it having an actual plot to fall back on, but culture is as much fruit for zombies as it is food for the soul.
But who decides who the sleepers are?
I have dived into the rabbit hole to spear the truth about climate change and the environment, and found that there is progress, but mostly there’s confusion.
Example: Why do people still hark back to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997? It was a poor agreement that would have shaved six years off the results of doing nothing: business as usual, 2094, same as full implementation of Kyoto, year 2100.
Two-thirds of the American cost of implementing Kyoto could provide clean water and sanitation to everyone on the planet who doesn’t have it (figures are 2001 estimates, not from corporate shills).
Am I a zombie for thinking it better to extend life expectancy in the developing world than to sign an agreement that would impact the media more than reality?
Why is Al Gore an icon of the environment? Because he made a movie. And it’s very impressive.
But wait. Wasn’t this guy vice-president of the United States for eight years? Odd no one refers to his accomplishments while in office.
Am I popping blue pills by the industrial unit for thinking that being vice-president might have been a good time to do something?
Physician, heal thyself.
Michael Dance
Nanaimo
