If you suffer from Anxiety or Depression, I recommend that you do NOT read this piece.

It is easy to look away from the debris we leave in our wake. But if we are ever to change our trajectory, we must first be willing to stare at the wreckage.

This is a reflection on who we are and what we have become.

I’m no different than you. We all pollute. We all can stop, or at the very least, make a difference.

Environmental Degradation & Waste

• We drive everywhere spewing particulate matter from fossil fuel exhaust, killing anything with the misfortune of being in our way.
• Operate gas-powered motor vehicles, polluting our forests, and calling it sport. We are pleased with our fine selves when we don’t throw our garbage out in this environment but bring it home to throw in a landfill.
• Toss every bit of material packaging, Styrofoam, recyclables, and foodstuffs in the trash – then complain that we must drag it to the curb. Or, under the cover of darkness, take our big items to someone else’s property and dump them there to save ourselves a costly trip to the landfill.
• We cut down trees and bulldoze the pristine habitat that serves as a fragile barrier against our incendiary lifestyles and fight tirelessly to attain the advantage and rights to keep doing it.
• We celebrate holidays with an orgy of waste and consumerism – chemical-soaked wrapping paper and bags stuffed in suitcases and dragged around the country on an airplane that spews trails of fuel particulates across the skies, using enough energy to fire up a small country every year in house lighting, or design a national spectacle that rivals a WWII mortar barrage, driving terrified animals and birds to their deaths. Some huge corporations recreate this every night.
• We take a flame-thrower to nature in the name of profit, while turning it on anyone who dares to oppose our right to do so.

Chemicals, Consumption, & “Cleanliness”

• Consume chemical-laden foods designed to survive the next ice age – highly processed, oil-laden Frankenfood created in test tubes designed to get us addicted to fat, sugar, and salt.
• Drink polluted water from plastic bottles and feel good about recycling them, while complaining about microplastics in our kid’s bloodstream.
• Urinate a few milliliters into a porcelain bowl of pure drinkable water that other people would die to drink, and then flush it away from our sight with liters more, after wiping our butts with butter-soft chemical-soaked paper from decimated old-Growth forests.
• Pay and watch as other people dump chemicals on our land and crops so we don’t have weeds spoiling our GMO’d leafy greens, or a blemish on your apple. After all, it’s reasonable to think that one thing in life should be perfect, right?
• Enter your house and breathe in the natural scent of artificial air fresheners.
• Spray chemicals on our furniture and floors to kill germs and “clean” them.
• Use our shower or whirlpool bathtub as a personal spa, wasting liters of clean water as we smear chemicals on ourselves to get “clean.” That not-so-fresh feeling? Unacceptable.
• Complain that the pellets we put in our laundry to keep it smelling “fresh” for a month are too strong.
• Can’t crack a window to air out our toxic environment because we must save Money.
• Pop and inject chemical pharmaceuticals, stressing our liver and kidneys, to right a wrong a healthy Lifestyle would circumvent.
• Drink industrially produced beverages of chemical origin with unnatural colors marketed as lifestyle choices by people who know how to have fun.
• Inject ourselves with bovine pathogens and silicone fillers and smear more chemicals we cannot pronounce on ourselves in the name of beauty.
• Create chemical agents and technological marvels that we cannot destroy but can destroy us.

Animal Treatment

• Grind up dead animal carcasses and serve them to their own species, animals kept in conditions that cause them to suffer, to feed our bottom line. Or consume highly processed, lab-produced vegan food-like substances to keep our sensibilities intact.
• Lock feeder animals in cages we whitewash by calling them barns, some never seeing sunlight in their short lives, forcing them to shit on themselves and walk and Sleep in their waste, and have the audacity to call them “dirty.”

Societal Behavior, Mindsets, & Conflict

• Leave our vehicles running while we are not in them because we want to take our dogs for a drive. Domestic pets get privileges that feeder animals will never enjoy.
• Applaud political representatives who will fight for our right to spew waste products exactly as we please – after all, we Love oil and gas.
• Book our trips overseas by air. Take a trip by air to a hostile nation because we want to see a game, or enjoy a concert because we have that right. It’s a free country.
• Crank our heat and air conditioning to our comfort level because it’s our damn house and everyone knows it’s no different than a medieval castle because it’s mine, so back off.
• Go online and pollute the minds of others with hate speech, rage, and fear-mongering rhetoric.
• Systematically contaminate the minds of children with fear of a legendary violent warrior lamb and wonder why we have so much internal hate, rage, and anxiety in our societies.
• We stand in our community circles, some of us holding weapons, others shielding themselves from violence, and light the matches of dissension, while crying free speech!
• When we need what others have or feel disrespected, we gather the troops and fly our planes and sail our football field’s long ships armed with bombs designed to blow up entire city blocks halfway across the world to set fire to someone else’s world.
• We laugh at those we call bleeding hearts, because, according to our version of truth, they know not what they do.

Reflection on the Human Condition

I get it. You read this and are frustrated. Well, what do you want me to do? You say, We’re all circling the bowl anyway.

Perhaps someone will come to save us, we think…to take us up into the clouds or, at the very least, to another planet, even one so hostile to humanity that we need solid, impenetrable barriers and more technological marvels to protect us from it. In our desperation, we don’t recognize the actual threat is the trillionnaire god we’ve made in our own image, and now worship for creating the starship.

We, who are awash in chemicals not designed for human wellbeing, cry and lament when one of us sickens and dies, declaring them “gone too soon.”

This is US. Unadorned, violent, and insatiable.

We consider ourselves smart; so stupid we will never recognize irony until we come face to face with our own extinction.

We are killing ourselves in the name of living.

I still hold out a glimmer of hope that we will wake up and not receive what we deserve.

Originally Published on https://akasha111blog.wordpress.com/

Paula Tozer Author

Paula D. Tozer is the author of three books - Saving Your Own Life: Learning to Live Like You Are Dying; An Elegant Mind's Handbook, and Enchanting Treve, a Novel. She is also an actor, singer/songwriter, Creativity Coach, competitive speaker, and leader with Toastmasters, as well as an avid cyclist, hiker, gym rat, and critter lover. The vast majority of her accomplishments have been achieved after the age of 50, demonstrating that It is never too late to be what you truly could have been...

Paula believes that living fiercely at any age is the way to optimize our time on this side of the grass. She has taken up the mission to inspire and motivate her contemporaries with what she has found that has allowed her to age with elegance, vitality, and most of all, good humor!