According to the will of Alfred Nobel – ironically, the inventor of dynamite – the Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
The most noble and noteworthy winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, among the 2,000 or so scientists serving on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the man who used to be “the next president of the United States.” I won’t get started on a rant about the Electoral College, but the people of this nation picked the right candidate. According to the 105,417,258 Americans who voted in the 2000 presidential election, 51,003,926 people allied themselves with Albert Arnold Gore Jr., but since the election, he has turned into a philanthropist, activist and role model for citizens of the world.
You better believe a little lingering resentment rests within the soul of this great man over losing to a second generation, silver spoon-fed tyrant who defended his veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, preventing low-income children from getting health care coverage, by saying “poor kids first.” According to The New York Times, Gore warned in 2002 that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” Today marks the five-year anniversary of President Bush’s signing of the congressional authorization to use military force in Iraq.
It is in this sense that Gore shouldn’t run again. As healing as it would be to replace “The War President” with a recognized Nobel Peace Prize winner, it is important for America to change. Instead of picking fights and issuing threats, we must become united to solve a threat that could kill everyone and everything on the most radiant of the eight planets, with apologies to Jupiter and Saturn.
Most of the country is already tired of the same song and dance performed by our current candidates for leader of the free world. If anyone has ever ventured outside of America, they would know we are perceived as one of the most despised countries on the planet. We are viewed as crass, arrogant, smug, chauvinistic and elitist. A country cannot be elitist, however, without elites, and our current government has regrettably provided no evidence to support that theory.
But a truly united America must become so thorough the channeling of a universal goal or objective. There is no issue in society as a whole with more potential destruction than global climate change. Regardless of the alleged distortion of facts or misrepresentation of charts in Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” global climate change, if unchecked, will devastate the future of human life.
Everyone in the South, as well as much of America, has already felt the somewhat subtle but ever-present effects of global warming. Certainly, debate ages on about the cause of Hurricane Katrina’s freakish strength or the 2005 tsunami that devastated most of Southeast Asia. Not much attention in this country has been put on massive waves of flooding in Bangladesh and Nepal over the summer that killed at least 1,000 people and displaced upwards of 20 million, leading the United Nations to call the event “the worst flooding in living memory.”
More and more often, storms labeled “rare” and “one in a million” provide seemingly endless destruction. Gore has been at the forefront of the fight, organizing events such as Live Earth to raise awareness across the globe. In a string of concerts on all seven continents, musicians, actors, authors, politicians, athletes and humans saw, read or heard about this world-changing event, viewed by more people than any other televised event in history. The reach of Gore’s influence has turned this once shy, soft spoken vice president into one of the most heroic, admirable and beloved people on the third rock from the sun. The extent of his admirable qualities could make him the perfect candidate to repair the already severed perception of America across the globe.
But he won’t run. He has said in the past, were he to actually run, that his focus would be diverted from this most global of issues to every other aspect of the presidency, and his fight against man-made climate change would be hindered. But because he exists as such an inspiring figure for the future of humanity, he is the perfect candidate for president. War should not be at the forefront of our democracy; rather, saving everyone should be priority No. 1.
After winning the prize, Gore held a press conference to acknowledge the tireless work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. About the state of the world today, Gore said, “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”
It’s time to accept the challenge. It’s time to save the world.
—–Contact Eric Freeman at [email protected]