Review of the lecture of Paul Simon
"Are We Tapped Out?"
My paper for English 101H class of prof. F.Libman.

In his lecture Paul Simon emphasizes possible lack of water on our planet in the nearest future. He speculates on the constant growth of the population on Earth (1 billion at 1830, 2 billions in 1930 and 6 billions in 1999) and tries to persuade the audience in the importance of preservation fresh water by any means. Paul Simon is an old man and desire for popularity by any price is quite understandable. For me this lecture was nothing more then playing on the fears of the mankind that something wrong might happen. If to use all scientific reports we posses we will find out that there is not only the possibility of the lack of water in future, but the lack of food at the first place right now. It is ridiculous that Mr. Simon mentioned this at the beginning of his lecture, as "the well-known fact", but then he continued with telling us about one more problem, that could happen to our society but not happened yet. Obviously Mr. Simon does not exploit the hunger topic because it was used many times by more successful lectures then he is. He just skips to something less worn and new: he faces his young audience with the water problem on Earth, isn't it new?! Indeed, more problems we are faced to, more strength we will find in ourselves to struggle and overcome them. But another situation is also possible: being faced with so many problems, with global problems and everyday problems, a person can suddenly become totally indifferent and not interested in anything that's going on on this planet. Or a person loaded with excessive problems can become so irritated that he or she can just get a gun and start doing something about overpopulation on our planet. I can imagine that not many other problems preoccupy this old gentleman, and the last of them is sanity of his audience after his lecture. I consider his lecture to be totally absurd and vain in comparison with other problems that mankind has nowadays. I am only thankful to myself that I did not bother to listen to his lecture in person because otherwise I would probably not be able to keep silent about all nonsense I've heard and about using facts of everyday child's deaths because of the bad quality of water in order to play on listener's sense of guilt and get some reaction from the audience. In the end I would like to apologize because I do not know all circumstances that lead Mr. Simon to investigate this problem and I do not know other lectures or works of Mr. Simon, probably they are not that much hopeless as this one.



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