Save the Whales! And the Earth!

(Two blog posts from me in one day? Wow-ee. Can you handle the excitement?)

Last week for movie night, we watched An Inconvenient Truth.

Despite my status as a registered, ballot-wielding Republican, I happen to be sensitive to some environmental issues. And I realize that it all needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but the whole thing causes me some dissonance. I seem to have a continual voting dilemma-- do I vote for the party which supports the environmental issues that I am genuinely concerned about, or do I vote for the party which supports the other 99% of the things that I'm interested in? I tend to vote for the latter, and then I feel bad for not doing my part environmentally. I recycle when I can, and whatnot, but I wonder if my interests would better match with one of those parties that never wins any elections (not the Neowhig party.)

It's been in me for a long time.

I've remembered a couple stories from my childhood that I thought I would post.

Sometime in elementary school, I used our Mac to make a poster. It was a nice poster that I made in QuarkExpress. It had a little border around the edge and a big clip-art picture of a whale, and it said in really big letters "SAVE THE WHALES." I printed it on our dot matrix printer, and photocopied a bunch of them on Dad's copy machine in his home office. I went around the neighborhood and taped them to every lamp-post on my block.

I don't know what I expected to happen. Maybe people would start saying to themselves:
"Oh! We should save the whales. At first I was thinking that we shouldn't, but now that I've seen this smart poster, I think I'll change my mind and start to save whales!"

Despite my protests, my parents made me remove all of them. Probably the same evening that I'd posted them.

And then another time, I talked Lavish into making a Save the World commercial with me. It didn't go very far, really. We had a big video camera that I thought we could use. Lavish wondered how we would get it on tv. I was sure that we could just call up and get a tv station to agree to help us out with it. I called the TV station that was listed in the phone book and left a message.

They called me back while I was mopping. We were in trouble! for nothing! and so my sisters and I were having to clean the kitchen. (Chores like mopping always take much, much longer to do as a little kid than they do as an adult, because little kids don't have the same coordination that adults do.)

My dad told me that the TV station was on the phone. He didn't know why they were calling me. A nice man explained to me how expensive it was to produce commercials, and to air them. He asked me what my favorite TV show was (Woody Woodpecker) and told me how much it would cost to do a short commercial during that show. He liked to talk, and so even after I realized that we wouldn't be able to do our commercial, I kept asking good questions. He talked at length. I think it ended up being 40 minutes or an hour. By the time he was done talking, my dad had cooled down, and I didn't have to mop anymore. It was fantastic.

I was also a card-carrying member of the RecyCOOL club, but I don't have much to say about that.