Mr. Menard Tribute [KMLA 18th waver Yeong Won Jeon]: The Age of STUPID

"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."

-Bertrand Russell

Teh Age of SutipD

...The Age of Stupid

Probably just a few wouldn’t know that Neil Armstrong was the first mankind to set his foot on the moon. Meanwhile just a few would know that about 5000 people die around the world each day due to the pollution of water. It is remarkable that humans know a fact about a planet which is more than two hundred thousand miles away from us while they do not know what is going on in their own.

We, the people in 2013, live inside what we call ‘the modern world’. Nonetheless, in this ‘modern world’ and the ‘great technology/science’ we are living in, humans may be facing their worst barrier yet, the environmental contamination created by their own actions. ‘The Age of Stupid’, directed by Franny Armstrong, explains how humans feel and behave towards climate change. According to the movie, the Earth may extinct by 2055 if we do not show any actions to preserve the environment from climate changes. The excessive uses of valuable resources only led to fatal damage to the nature. The movie further elaborates about people’s perspectives about the changes, how they live and what they do during these changes occur. Furthermore, it suggests what and why problems occur due to people’s actions.

Of course, many people are aware by the media that they are facing a serious issue. However, the main problem is that first, they do not think it is emergent. The remaining resources are only usable for a few decades but do not seem like an immediate danger. For instance, about seventy percent of Americans believes in climate changes, but fifty eight percent did not think that it was a threat to them. Moreover, merely a thirty two percent believed their actions could slow climate changes and only fifteen volunteered to do so.

The second problem is the wrong distribution of resources. For instance, Nigeria is one of the mainstream oil producing countries, where about 2.53 million barrels of oil is produced each day. However, the profit is lost between the political corruption and the precious resource enters the hands of other modernized countries. About fifteen percent of it is then used to create cheap plastic toys, encase them with plastic packages, and sold inside of plastic boxes. Every two days, thousands of them are broken and carried away to the dumping ground to decay there for five hundred years. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, seventy percent of its citizens live on less than one dollar a day while only seventeen percent of the country’s oil is used for the citizens. Hence, the waste of resources caused even more pollution and exploitation of countries for an addition.

Also, relating to the first problem is the Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome. Many people do know about environmental problems, and many people do think they are serious. But when it comes to actualizing the resolutions, then people’s thoughts change. For example, in the ‘The Age of Stupid’, people did think that climate changes were serious and they must do something in order to help the world, but on the other hand, they refused to install wind turbines in their area just because they ruined the view; or more like they looked bad. Moreover in Korea, the citizens’ recognition quotient of climate changes was about seventy points while their behavioral quotient only reached thirty. As such, it is perhaps the biggest problem that people do perceive the problem, but not willing to resolve it themselves.

Climate change. It is undoubtedly a serious problem in the current society. Disbelieving attitude is merely neglecting the truth and refusing to ameliorate the situation. It is said that we must stabilize the amount of resources by 2015 in order to reset the climate change. It is no longer a time to ignore the problem while it worsens. Now we must see the truth, the problem, and seek solution. Just as the movie says, we must escape ‘the age of stupid’, where we do nothing while seeing the fatal consequence creep towards us, as if trying to commit suicide. It is time to recognize, to resolve the troubles humans ourselves have made.