This week I finished:

Matewan: In college, a teammate on the ultimate Frisbee team was a graduate student in the film school and cited this movie as one of his favorites. I watched it a long time ago and re-watched it this week. I found it compelling as a movie. Having taken acting classes, I thought about how much fun an actor could have playing the bad guys since they were so over-the-top.

I don’t know much of the history the movie plays out in. Now I’m learning about the coal wars and the growth of unions then. I was probably motivated to watch it again in part from finishing Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein: I wanted to like this book and am surprised it took me this long to get to it. I respect the research she put into it. I agree with many points, like

• “We need to fix ourselves, not fix the world”
• “[We need] game-changing [policy battles] that don’t merely aim to change laws but change patterns of thought… a space for a full-throated debate about values—about what we owe to one another based on our shared humanity, and what it is that we collectively value more than economic growth and corporate profits.”
• “the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away.”

But she presumes people she disagrees with are polluting just for profit, saying they deny the science and don’t care. I see her as doing the dance I recently described, in which neither the left or right act effectively while blaming the other. She doesn’t act herself, while constructing excuses to protect herself from personal responsibility. I don’t think she considers her pollution from denialism on her part, so why the lack of empathy for others?

I don’t consider myself a free-market fundamentalist, but at least I try to understand them on their terms.

She lives the pattern I described of people saying the people who suffer the most didn’t cause the problem, then going to them to help them, which means not solving the problem. She just attacks people on the right, though also some on the left, but doesn’t lead them. I think she just wants to defeat them.

Yet the left, including her, belong to the same culture rationalizing and justifying polluting and depleting. She has her frequent flyer card and uses technology to fight science to get pregnant. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her son, whom she likely wished was a daughter.

She says our last hope is indigenous cultures, as if the rest of us can’t change ourselves.

I found this book engaging and often compelling, but not effective for leadership, often counterproductive. It seems like her solutions are all what she wanted before she learned about climate change, implying she didn’t reconsider her views from learning about it.

Still, I downloaded a bunch of videos of her speaking about the book. I’ll keep learning more about it. I figure I’ll meet her some day.

• ← Some of my creative writing and editing process
• Tina Tombstone, a friend I volunteer delivering food with, on Fifth Avenue with vegetables →