monday: politics

I didn't read or watch the news at all this weekend.
I can't remember the last time I tuned out so completely.
This morning, my alarm woke me with the news and I was again reminded of what a mess the world is.

What is happening in Lebanon is- how shall I say?
Not good.

I have friends and relatives who are divided on the issue.
I have an uncle who is Jewish and from Lebanon.
I have an ex-boyfriend who is Muslim and from Syria.
I am a Buddhist-leaning American who tends to side with Israel but is upset but by some their actions in the current conflict.
I all honesty, I need to sit down and read more before making any judgments.
I haven't been following the latest breakdown closely enough to make any confident calls.

In the meantime, I'm reading Back to Iraq, a blog that puts the events in Lebanon into human perspective. The blog is written and maintained by Christopher Allbritton, a true gonzo journalist who left his job at the New York Daily News to live and blog from a war zone: originally Iraq, and now Lebanon.

Moving on....
I went to dinner last night with a fairly large group of friends who introduced me to their friend visiting from South Carolina. Somehow our introductory niceties veered quickly into a heated discussion about global warming. He argued that there is no real evidence of global warming being an actual or attributable occurrence.

I am a terrible debater- I become a blubbering idiot when put on the spot or faced with confrontation- but I somehow managed to harness my torrent of emotion into a relatively coherent stream of information that got this guy to admit that there might be something to this global warming thing, and to promise that he'd go see An Inconvenient Truth before making up his mind on the matter.

Being in New York, I take for granted that everyone has at least a small amount of exposure to the truth of what is taking place in our environment.
Last night was a shocking reminder that this is not the case.

I beg of you, if you have not seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, make every effort to see it before coming to conclusions about global warming and/or the environment. If you're not in a place where you have access to it, do some research online.
There is a wealth of information at your fingertips, to use a dead cliche.
A reasonable place to start is the website for An Inconvenient Truth.

If you have a hard time hearing the information from a political figure whose ideology you don't agree with, try putting politics aside for a moment and keep in mind that there is no opposition in the scientific community to the information Gore disseminates in this movie. It is factually based and scientifically verified. If you need further convincing, you can read or search this article, which is all over the web: Scientists OK Gore's Movie for Accuracy.