Every hour should be Earth Hour

March 31, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

My daily commute takes me past a small farm with a field where sheep graze every afternoon. Lambs walk with their mothers beneath the sunshine and play at the edge of a small pond where geese paddle lazily and shake droplets from their feathers. No matter how rotten a mood I’m in, how intense the tribulations of the day’s labours past, the innocence of this little place is unfailingly soothing, like visual yoga for the soul. Tonight we are asked beginning at 8:30 pm to turn off our electronics and live in that same silence and simplicity for an hour. Communities around the globe have thrown down the gauntlet to see who can outdo the other in terms of the biggest percentage drop in power demand. The ostensible goal of Earth Hour is to raise awareness of what the consumptive attitude of humanity is doing to its only home. But it behooves us as a species to be aware of the earth every hour of every day; of the treasures it holds and of the unparalleled, impossible-to-duplicate magnificence in something as small as a blade of grass waving in the breeze. Just pause, for one cleansing breath, before we climb back in the SUV and crank up the thousand-megawatt subwoofers.

This is a tough time for our planet. The human population has surged past 7 billion, and shortsightedness and greed on the part of a wealthy few has led to extreme poverty for the majority. And when the economy slows down, it is left to the earth to make up the difference. Dirty industry flourishes in the interest of quick growth; environmental review processes are gutted to get factories moving fast. Moneyed interests push misinformation about climate change into mainstream accepted thought. Anyone who suggests we slow down and give less destructive alternatives their due consideration is pilloried as a job-killing, tree-hugging, pinko Communist (Stalin’s and Mao’s lasting legacies being their keen environmental stewardship, naturally). The Lorax, the recent movie based on the fable by Dr. Seuss, was trashed in certain segments of the press for pushing an undesirable agenda onto kids, because it dared to suggest that levelling all the trees in sight wasn’t necessarily a good idea. We are in an era of reverse ecology – it has somehow become “cool” to hate the earth, and morally sound to sacrifice it on the altar of the GDP at every opportunity. As a result, turning one’s lights off for an hour one Saturday night a year feels like shouting into the winds of a rising storm.

The ad hominem counter-arguments will no doubt come fast and furious. “Oh yeah, well, why don’t you give up your car and your computer and go live in a cave somewhere, you stupid eco-fasci-socialist.” I’m not suggesting that the world shut itself off and return to a purely agrarian existence; that’s fantasy. Surely human beings are clever enough to figure out a way to have our toys and clean air too. As Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth, what is lacking is the will. How do we change our collective attitude from hungry consumer to responsible warden of a suffering world?

Maybe it begins with taking that moment to watch the lambs in the field, to reconnect with the innocent. To recognize that whatever you believe put us here – God, evolution or random chance – also gave us the capacity to appreciate and cherish beauty in all its forms, and an abiding wish to not see beauty destroyed for selfish, temporary gain. If it is indeed our duty to leave to our children better than we ourselves have inherited, then we owe each of them the chance to experience the forest, the ocean and the snow-capped mountain peak as we have. This can be the nobler purpose to which we aspire. We can start making the hard choices that reflect both our individual and societal commitment to achieving that purpose – saying no to the cheap and easy solutions and the leaders who peddle them, and embracing our human responsibility to tend the garden of our unique home. For all the beauty present in the world is of the earth, and as the earth dies, so does beauty. No matter our political stripe, we can agree that beauty is worth saving. And it is a solemn obligation that extends far beyond the dying seconds of Earth Hour.

In like a lamb

March 1, 2012March 1, 2012 ~ Graham Milne

: A perfect metaphor for March 1st, 2012.

Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing advice is, never open your book with weather. So with apologies to Mr. Leonard and his learned wisdom, I’m starting off March with a few comments about the state of the climate. It was not that long ago that I recall temperatures plunging to the minus twenties in the middle of February, jagged sheets of ice coating my apartment windows and blocking the view of the mountains of white beyond. I’m not going to complain about a more modest than usual February heating bill, but this is ridiculous. I’ve had to shovel the driveway exactly twice this entire winter. I missed doing it so much I actually shovelled both my neighbours’ driveways just to get in the extra few minutes of cardio. My better half’s allergies have been in overdrive all season as it never got cold enough to kill off the mould and spores of autumn rot. And we did double-takes this morning when birds started chirping outside. The geese have figured it out – they never flew anywhere this winter. Think there could possibly be a relation to, well, I don’t know, um, global CO2 emissions being higher than ever before? Nah, it’s sunspots. We’re actually in a cooling phase. It’s just Al Gore, Solyndra and the Islamofascisocialists trying to sell you solar panels. Think I’ll fill my Hummer with Super-Hi-Grade and then run over a spotted owl. Suck it, Mother Nature. FREEDOM!!!

Yep, it’s gonna be one of those days.

I love the Search Engine terms tracker on the WordPress dashboard. It is genuinely amusing to see how people find me, and I can’t help imagining the tremendous disappointment that must occasionally result. I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of hits from people who saw The Grey and are looking for references to the “Live and die on this day” quote – that at least relates to something of substance. I get a few from people searching for My Little Pony, The Verve, Coldplay, other search terms that happen to coincide with some of my random word strings, like “grahams wall of sound”. But some of these other search engine terms are just plain bizarre. The one that really made me laugh was “kesha good looking”. Someone on the hunt for images of Kesha for what I’m certain are nothing less than the purest of purposes ended up here? Granted some of what I write can hopefully be very thought-provoking, but those are definitely not the thoughts I’m trying to provoke. Eeeww. We won’t have none of that ‘ere, mate. Keep calm and carry on. Besides, silly rabbit, you should know that “Kesha” and “good looking” are not terms that relate. Ooh, how catty of me. Thanks, try the veal.

I wonder what it must feel like to have a voice that other people love to impersonate. Do they ever listen to themselves and think, “good God, do I really sound like that?” My own voice is quite unremarkable, so I enjoy dressing it up with different accents whenever the opportunity arises. The other day I was watching a YouTube clip of Michael Caine doing an impression of himself, or more accurately, Michael Caine doing Peter Sellers doing Michael Caine. It was all in good fun, of course, but how frustrating must it be that almost everyone you meet will be some wag who thinks he can “do you”? As I’m certain even ordinary lads from Glasgow or Belfast must roll their eyes at attempts by continentals to affect their unique, history-nurtured tones. One of the cardinal rules on whatever film set he happened to be working was that no one was allowed to impersonate Sean Connery, which I’m sure didn’t stop them from trying to slur “Missh Moneypenny” behind his back. That is the problem, naturally – everyone thinks they can mimic Sean Connery and almost no one can pull it off. The same goes for John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Johnny Carson and most of Rich Little’s repertoire. Voice actors, I’m told, often start from a celebrity impersonation when they’re working up a new character. The scratchy warbles of The Simpsons’ Moe the bartender began from what his performer Hank Azaria called a bad Al Pacino impression. Somehow I doubt anyone will ever be accused of doing a bad Graham Milne impression – except maybe myself.

So what are my goals for this month? Thirty-one days of possibility lie ahead, full of opportunity for both triumph and tragedy. Gonna try to keep blogging as close to daily as I can, have a new screenplay to start working on, and, because I find that putting it out there publicly is a good way to motivate myself, I’m going to begin sending out my long-gestating novel to agents and publishers. Hopefully the response will be as promising as that which has greeted my musings here. If all goes well, maybe, by the 31st, I will, like the lion, have a good reason to roar. Stay tuned!

Caveat elector

August 2, 2011August 2, 2011 ~ Graham Milne ~ 4 Comments

You can’t blame an un-housebroken puppy for making a mess on your living room floor. Nor should anyone, in a democracy, feign shock at the actions of the stupendously incompetent who ride into office on waves of voter discontent and proceed to wreck the place. As I’m writing this, the United States Senate has just passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, avoiding by the narrowest of margins a default brought on by the extreme right-wing elements of the Republican Party who were swept into power in the 2010 midterm elections. The Brothers Ford are threatening to balance Toronto’s books by… cutting books (i.e. libraries), as it turns out that all of the city’s fiscal woes cannot, in fact, be cured by eliminating the “gravy train.” You can’t really blame these people for being unskilled and unfit to govern. They didn’t put themselves in office. We should blame ourselves for buying what they’ve sold without thoroughly kicking the tires first.

In politics, the simplest message is the most successful. “I Like Ike.” “Yes We Can.” “It’s the economy, stupid.” “Stop the gravy train.” “He didn’t come back for you.” So too does it often seem that the simplest people have the simplest time getting elected – for the simple reason that running a campaign of pandering is the simplest path to victory. Tell people what they want to hear often enough and you’ll convince them. Why? Because democracy is a pain in the ass. In a democracy, the governed are meant to stay informed, learn about issues, examine all sides of a problem and keep their representatives honest. The problem is, nobody really wants to do that. The majority of us are perfectly happy to leave governing to anyone who wants to, so long as we don’t have to. The least we are asked to do is vote and many of us can’t even be bothered doing that. Those of us who do bother are usually seduced by the infamous simple message. “I don’t like taxes and this guy says he’s going to cut them, that’s good enough for me.” Imagine interviewing someone for a job at your company – you have an applicant who has no prior experience, no qualifications for the position and just keeps repeating the phrase “Hire me and I’ll save you money.” You’d be showing him the door faster than you can say “hard-working families.” Yet politicians use the same strategy to find their way into highly-paid positions of authority where they can affect thousands, even millions of lives.

George W. Bush came from a legacy of failed business ventures and could barely pronounce half the words in the English language and he was placed in charge of the nuclear launch codes for eight tumultuous years. I choose not to believe it was because the majority who voted for him were stupid. It was the widespread laissez-faire attitude I’ve described above that favored his simple answers over the more complicated solutions Al Gore and John Kerry respectively were offering instead. The irony is that governing is complicated. Anyone who says it is simple is lying for votes. Good governing is a dance of nuance, intelligence, curiosity, respect, and compromise when necessary. Not everyone can do it and it demands minds that are sharp and inquisitive and not chained to ideology at the expense of reason. A four-year-old who’s heard a slogan on TV can repeat it ad infinitum, but you wouldn’t consider putting him in charge of the Ministry of Finance. You wouldn’t even put him in charge of a lemonade stand.

So let’s set our standards higher – if we do not demand more from candidates, if we continue to let them get away with pandering, pat answers to complex questions, if we continue to vote by picking the least of the worst – we should not be surprised when it turns out that the people we’ve elected are completely unsuited to handle the complex questions that will arise in the course of governing. Because whacking the puppy with the newspaper after the fact isn’t going to do much to clean up the steaming pile lying in the middle of the floor. Better yet, instead get a cat – they are smart enough to know to use the litter box in the first place.