The Day We Can Globally Celebrate

How do we correct a collective addiction to shopping when we’ve yet to correct a collective addiction to disposability, to conveniently throwing non-biodegradable garbage down a dark chute like we’re safely dispensing it into a black-hole singularity to be crushed into nothing? And so much of it is from gratuitous purposes, e.g. plastic from individually wrapped toilet paper rolls. (Why, so the consumer can enjoy opening each roll for its after-dinner freshness?)

Big business is allowed to emit pollutants out of exhaust and drainage pipes, or spewed from sky-high jet engines and very tall smoke stacks — or goes unpunished even after causing the largest contamination events. It all can somehow be safely absorbed into the air, sea and land — out of sight, out of mind.

And then there’s the astonishingly short-sighted, entitled selfishness. I observed this a few years ago when a TV news reporter randomly asked a young urbanite wearing sunglasses what he thought of the then-new government restrictions on disposable plastic straws. “It’s like I’m living in a nanny state,” he recklessly retorted. “The government’s always telling me what I can and cannot do.”         

In actuality, there has been discouragingly insufficient political courage and will to properly act upon man's morbid pollution, and even less so the cause-and-effect of manmade global warming and climate change. There still prevails a do-little-or-nothing policy among the world’s top leaders, a number of whom remain more or less steered by big fossil fuel interests.

To me, general human existence has for too long been analogous to a cafeteria line-up consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line. Many of them further fight over to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much they should have to pay for it — all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they’re all permanently confined, owned and operated by (besides the wealthiest passengers) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated. ‘Liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ (etcetera) are overly preoccupied with criticizing one another for their politics and beliefs thus diverting attention away from the greatest polluters’ moral/ethical corruption, where it should and needs to be sharply focused.

But I still see some hope for spaceship Earth and therefor humankind due to environmentally conscious and active children, especially those who are approaching/reaching voting age. In contrast, the dinosaur electorate who have been voting into high office consecutive mass-pollution promoting or complicit/complacent governments for decades are gradually dying off thus making way for far more healthy-planet-thus-people minded voters.