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Open Letter to John Travolta (and those who can afford it)

Dear John Travolta,
I'm on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney and have just watched a doco about you. Well I thought it was going to be about you and your home but it was mainly about you and Qantas and the big new Airbus. You are their ambassador after all.

I'm an actor and I have admired your work for many years. I thank you for the great pleasure you have given me. But I have to say I was really quite shocked by the program. Perhaps you made it before Global Warming came into your field of vision. Perhaps it just doesn't figure. You may not be aware that flying is becoming a dilemma because of the conflict between it's importance in the world economy and the fact that it is a huge contributor of Greenhouse gas emissions.

The documentary showed you with your air planes ( parked outside your house which has a runway big enough for a 747 jumbo!) and you spoke of the joy and thrill of your childhood in a world that was boundless in it's possibilities and the time when you fell in love with flight. We watched you flying yourself, wife and daughter, and your sister, I believe, with a crew of five on a 'world tour'. Ten of you flying in a 707 (?) As I watched your daughter I couldn't help but think how different is the world for her - although of course the world you are giving her is the one of limitless possibilities while the reality is that those limits have been reached.

It creates a very confusing and confronting state of being when people like yourself, whom we admire and look up to and take as examples of what to aspire to, do things that surely are no longer ethical. There must be (if one insists on being in the public gaze) a more responsible approach to the things one does. It is time now for people like yourself: intelligent, warm, generous of spirit and compassionate to help guide us away from the consumerist greed that has taken our planet to the edge.

I write this with no feeling of disrespect or any desire to insult and offend. Rather it is with respect and a desire to urge people like yourself to help bring about the changes that will pull us from the edge.

William Zappa
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