I thought this article that appeared in USA Today (besides being surprising) was so well written and worth sharing. The entire article is worth the read, but I want to highlight a section that gets another message across.
This piece shows how correct Al Gore’s discussion that our Climate Crisis is a moral issue that reaches across political parties is.
“They saw the light
Jones gets pumped for night games with two movies: Jet Li’s martial arts epic, Fearless, and Al Gore’s documentary. “Both get me fired up,” he says.
Standing in contrast is Tiffany Legg, a sunny blond sophomore from the University of Oklahoma. She hopes to give her Inconvenient Truth slide shows to high schoolers as well as executives at oil giant Conoco, where she has interned.
Is that a receptive audience?
“I do feel they can become carbon-neutral,” she says, sounding every bit the Miss Oklahoma contestant she has been.
Just to make sure people are paying attention, Jayni Chase might bring along her husband when she gives the Gore show around her home in Westchester, N.Y.
“Chevy is really upset” about the environment, Chase says. She adds that the comedian is getting serious about swapping his favorite sports car for a hybrid alternative. “We can do the talk together. It’s just such an important issue.”
If these folks seem predisposed to Gore’s global-warming warning, Dunham was not.
Dunham is from Houston, where he worked in advertising and raised three children. He’s a proud American, a red-state guy who “voted for George W. twice,” he says. “I didn’t realize how much his connection to the oil industry would wind up mattering to me.”
The epiphany occurred July 3. Dunham was accompanying his wife, Jan, to Washington, D.C., where she was scheduled to give a talk to the Daughters of the American Revolution.
He stayed back at the hotel and flipped on the TV. Staring back were Oprah Winfrey and Leonardo DiCaprio. “I’m not fans of either,” but talk turned to Gore’s new movie. Not only did Dunham not change the channel, he hunted down a local theater and watched An Inconvenient Truth. The movie’s “scary stuff got me,” as well as the urgency of the problems, he says, from dying polar bears to melting ice caps. “When the movie ended, I was drained.”
And inspired. Dunham took his wife to the movie, an easy sell for the Democrat in the family. Then he went out and bought a laptop and the Inconvenient Truth book. Over the next few weeks, Dunham created his own slide show using photographed pages of Gore’s book and helped his wife present them at her DAR speaking engagements.
He decided to contact Gore’s office to make sure he was getting his facts right and was connected with longtime chief of staff Roy Neel, who asked for a copy of his reinterpretation of Gore’s presentation.
“I was sure he wanted to see it so he could sue me for copyright infringement,” Dunham says with a big laugh. Instead, Neel asked if Dunham wanted to be the first person taught by Gore to give the climate slide show.
That first fall group of 50 trainees — larger groups of 200 and 600 would be trained in December and January — got the personal touch, spending time on Gore’s farm.
“Al Gore came across as someone who really believed in what he was saying,” Dunham says. “That man charmed me.”
Dunham has been doing the same at the training session. With his white hair, blue blazer and teddy-bear-with-a-growl attitude, he exudes a confidence that he hopes trickles down to trainees.
‘Dad’s helping save the world’
“Besides just being liked by everybody, Gary provides a very powerful message that says you can be whoever you want politically, but the climate issue is irrelevant to that,” says Climate Project senior mentor Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist from Bethesda, Md., and sister to Fox legal eagle Greta.
Van Susteren has done dozens of presentations, while Dunham has racked up 82, spending “upward of five figures” to appear not only around Texas but throughout the country.
Van Susteren offers a professional explanation. “It’s therapeutic. You hear all this negative stuff about the state of the Earth, but then you do your slide show and you feel better,” she says.
For Dunham, the answer is simpler. “I’ve never done anything heroic that my family can remember me by. I didn’t cure a disease or save a life. But with this, my family says, ‘Dad’s helping save the world.’ “
Full article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-24-gore-trainees_N.htm
