Sydney, Australia, darkened -- kind of -- for Earth Hour 2007.
Twenty-six major cities around the world are expected to turn off the lights at 8 p.m. tonight on major landmarks, plunging millions of people into darkness to raise awareness about global warming, organizers said.
Anybody who lives in Sydney knows that Earth Hour was a monumental flop. Sydney did not plunge into darkness. It was a little bleaker than normal but still not quite as bleak as living in, say, Melbourne. In parks around Sydney, children could be heard chanting: “Turn them off!” long after the Great Switch Off had apparently begun. In the CBD, lights dimmed a little when the logos on the buildings went out. Most companies were too terrified to keep their logos burning during Earth Hour but what are the chances that Coca Cola will permanently give up its billboards? It’s absurd.
Earth Hour won't suffer for a lack of gimmicks. Servers wearing glow-in-the-dark necklaces will sell eco-tinis at bars and restaurants in Phoenix. A local yoga house in Michigan will offer sessions by lamplight, and the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago will have check-in by candlelight. Watching the lights wink off in major metropolitan areas might look impressive, but it's worth asking: What's the point? As Roberts himself notes, the energy saved by turning off your lights for an hour "won't make an enormous difference." So, if it won't cut carbon emissions, why bother then with Earth Hour, or Earth Day or Earth Live, last year's daylong concert for the environment?
Because climate change is essentially a political problem, and the language of politics is symbolism. Just because an act is symbolic doesn't mean it empty.
Jeremiah Wright's preaching has dominated Trinity United Church of Christ, where Barack Obama worships.
Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America." The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric," including the claim that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."
In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with."
But is that answer good enough from a candidate for president of the United States? Should Barack Obama explicitly repudiate Wright's preaching? Or do Wright's words say nothing important about Obama's candidacy?
Obama has also said that Wright is "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." But who takes spiritual guidance from hate-spewing old uncles?
Wright isn't just someone with whom Obama is friendly. To criticize Obama for having friends with controversial, or even abhorrent, views would constitute guilt by association. But Wright is Obama's spiritual leader. To be sure, no thinking person always agrees with his minister, priest, or rabbi on political and social issues. But it's unusual for a thinking person to retain an affiliation with a church whose leader attacks his country unless, at a minimum, that person considers those attacks not "particularly controversial."
If there's a single theme to Obama's intellectual achievements, it's been his ability to seize upon powerful words and themes, lifting them out of their original context and reframing them to be inclusive and uplifting. Thus, Rev. Wright's fiery sermon on "The Audacity to Hope" in a racialized world becomes the title of Obama's serene meditation on the possibilities of transcending political and racial polarization. That seems to hold true more broadly. It's how Obama is able to credit the honorable motives of his opponents even as he disagrees with them. It's how Obama took the best of what Reverend Wright had to offer -- community, inspiration, rebukes for his congregation's shortcomings -- and set aside the anger and divisiveness that seemed to him relics of an earlier time.
