Sometimes events conspire to set the stage better than a person could wish. Such was the case in mid-July when Al Gore came to a Harvard Square bookstore to tout his new book An Inconvenient Truth which hammers home the nail no longer in dispute – that we as humans are impacting our environment in ways that may be irreversible if we don't take this seriously and do something about it soon.
The possibility that global warming had in fact outpaced even Al Gore's predictions must have been on the minds of the many who wrapped themselves in a long curly-queue of a line stretching from Harvard Yard almost to the Harvard Lampoon building. For all their eagerness to see the former second-most-powerful-person-in-the-universe, most people standing there sweating and waiting would have agreed: this was no laughing matter. With temperatures in the mid-90s, and humidity off the scale, it was high tropics in Boston, and it was worrying.
Gore, of course, was gracious upon arrival. Like every other Important Person on this planet, he was whisked beyond the crush of people to his anointed place, but before he sat down he spoke briefly to the eight camera-wielding press types lined up to blind him with their flashbulbs.
The press didn't have an easy time of taking his photo. Poor planning on the part of the bookstore placed photographers behind a structural column that stood between them and their prey. The usual jostling ensued, trying to get a view of the man around the pole.
The photographers' problem wasn't Gore's problem though. Lots of practice told him to stand up, move to his left, and speak succinctly. He proclaimed that political will, at least the kind needed to address global warming, "is a renewable resource". That is a proposition yet to be fully tested.
Then with only a hint of fatigue in his voice, he said that he'd sign some books now. Actually, he was about to sign a lot of books. Someone joked afterward that the pole might have been a perfect metaphor for the problems Gore had had on the stump – to get a good glimpse of the guy it was hard to know whether to look at him from the right or from the left.
Meanwhile, out on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Plympton Street was a sight to give the former Second In Command pause. Two sentries hoisting hand-made signs trumpeted an unfamiliar call to battle: Draft Gore in 2008.
Of course, the last time Gore found himself in Cambridge thinking about a draft, it wasn't the campaign trail being talked about. It was the jungles of Vietnam. Gore gamely volunteered himself for that one, reasoning that if it wasn't him, it was going to be somebody, so it might as well have been him. It's not clear if he's thinking along the same lines now that he's a grandfather.
Of course, Gore's undergraduate career and the Vietnam War are a long time ago now. An incoming freshman to Harvard this fall was born in 1988, two decades after the Tet offensive.
But each generation has its own battles. Antique though Gore may appear to Harvard's newest freshmen, the former VP is on to the top topic of this generation's greatest charge: how do we guarantee that this world's habitable two decades from now, not to mention twenty decades from now. He's written a book about it, and thank goodness, at least a lot of people around Harvard Square want to read it.
