Dear Matt Damon,
I know you’re a fine person. I know you are a fine actor. Fine friend, fine husband, fine dad. You are also in charge of storytelling and message making, and there was a film in which the message you made was fracking is bad.
I just want to point out that it’s not fracking that’s bad. It’s America.
I should tell you how I know. For six years in my twenties I went to environmental conventions across America with my husband. My job was to wait in the hotel room. I was supposed to stay upstairs until it was time to be brought down as the lovely dinner guest, the wife dinner guest, the one who didn’t know anything about engineering or oil or anything like that.
No.
What was I going to do, sit in a hotel room and watch General Hospital all day? That’s what I did in high school. I’d come home and watch General Hospital. At 24, 25, 26 I snuck into every single lecture. I was learning about fracking. I was learning about extracting oil. I was learning about soil remediation. Nobody noticed the wife in the back row and the wife in the back row was taking notes.
So it’s always bothered me when I see celebrities doing things wrong and spreading messages that seem wrong. And one of those happened to me from a good guy. From you. You seem like an all-around perfect American buddy. You’re our buddy. So when you made a movie about how bad fracking is, and everybody in America started saying fracking is bad, I had a problem. Because I’d been in the lectures. I knew what the movie should have been about, and it wasn’t fracking.
