When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it, focusing instead on the short-term.
Interpretation
Despair about the future can inhibit proactive behavior and promote short-sightedness.
In this quote, Al Gore highlights the detrimental effect of despair on our ability to take meaningful actions for the future. When individuals dwell on hopelessness, they become preoccupied with immediate concerns rather than engaging in efforts that will ensure a better long-term outcome, thus failing to make the necessary changes to improve their situation.
In practice
Using this quote in a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
Global warming is real and human activity is the main cause. The consequences are mainly negative and headed toward catastrophic, unless we act. However, the good news is that we can meet this challenge. It is not too late, and we have everything we need to get started.
The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.
I think it's harder for people than it should be. But as more and more of us become carbon neutral and change the patterns in our lives to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, we are now beginning to see the changes in policy that are needed.
We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.
Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.
Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.
But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.
When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him, by force.
I think that racism is ugly and so unfair, and I believe that we all need one another.
As an old soldier, I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little.
My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
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