Wednesday's movie

The movie that we watched in class if I remember correctly it was "Not in our Town" really had some moments that made me want to go down to Montana and shake some sense into these people.

It sparked the question how much is to much f what you say and did John Stokes cross the line? And to me that is a really hard question to answer. I feel that you need to be careful of what you say no matter the circumstance and you have to realize that your hate comments can have serious consequences. I do think that Stokes crossed the line, he told his listeners where some citizens live and they are the cause of our problems and you should go and do something about it. Who does that? And half of what he says is so ridiculous that some wonder where he gets his information.

Yet even though I think he crossed the line other's believe that he hasn't and he is walking a very fine line, or else he would have been taken off the air by now. It's well within in his rights to say what he believes in and his right to talk to certain callers. But what I would like to know is he getting away with this stuff because of the first amendment or are people to afraid to say anything? Are they afraid of what could happen? And what would happen if someone openly challenged him?

The other issue that was discussed in the movie that really bothered me was the fact that the environmentalists were called a green Nazi. To me that was extremely offensive, immature, uncalled for and based on incomplete information. Now I get some of their point of view that without getting timber from the forests and as a result shutting down the associating factories are going to cause a lot of lost jobs. But let's take a step back, first of all environmentalists have a pretty good reason for preserving forests. Around the world every 7 seconds enough trees are cut down to fill a football field. Also forest absorb carbon dioxide, and when they are cut down in releases all that CO2 into the atmosphere, which then contributes to global warming. In fact deforestation accounts for 25% of all CO2 emissions. I don't know maybe they don't think there is a global warming problem. What was also dumb was the fact that some of these citizens blamed the fires on the environmentalists, well guess what that is totally not true, the fires were most likely caused by intense heat and drought which by the way is a side affect of global warming, see the vicious cycle here?

That's pretty much all that I have to say, just if you have a problem handle in a mature way and try to see the whole picture not just one little piece that has to do with your own universe.