It really hit me when my family went to a theme park, the mass production of things to buy, the means by which they are created, what they are or may be, the foods manufactured to feed us, the labs where the ingredients are concocted, the methods of dealing with over-population, the waste and loss apparent from land-fills and oceans to the air we breathe and the health-related problems of our bodies, how it's connected.
And though it is, in some ways, fun and an escape from how we make a living to enjoy such diversions, it is costly in more ways than just getting a ticket and getting there.
When I ask my daughter if she had a good time and she says yes, the next topic will always be what her favorite part of it was. In that context, there is no worry, only fireworks.
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I remember seeing the old "Dixie Cup" TV commercials when I was a kid and thinking "Disposable cups? Won't that create an awful lot of trash?". Scaring us into buying their product (forever!) to guard against germs. Seems so quaint now, at a time when just about EVERYTHING is disposable. Cell phones, TVs, toasters. I just threw away another microwave oven. Emmet's ghost weeps while haunting the Best Buy that now sits on the former site of his Mayberry fix-it shop. If one of those cheap plastic take-out food containers were to fall into a time warp and end up in my grandmother's 1950s kitchen, she'd still be using it today.....
I recently tutored a friend's child for the first time. For a paper in his English class, he had written about the "meaning" of a story, which was that we should appreciate those things which we take for granted, because they might not always be there.
Did he write about his family? Did he write about his pets? Did he write about the earth, the sky, the moon, the trees?
No. He wrote about Coca-Cola, and what it would be like if he could never take a sip of Coca-COla again.
I almost cried.
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