The whole climate change crises is not news to me, in terms of my levels of anxiety associated with this subject. In fact, I remember in 1988 when I was a slip of a girl, receiving my very own Blue Peter book on how to help save the Earth by reducing greenhouse gases and to stop that big old hole in the ozone layer getting any larger. I seem to remember it mentioning fridges, pressurized deodorants and that I shouldn’t go to Australia without factor 110 sunscreen………
Fast forward to about five years before now and I started to have a new type of worry. It happened when I did my weekly food shop and I stood in the queue with my trolley full of shopping, awaiting my turn at the check-out. I looked at all my stuff, at everyone else’s stuff and then all the stuff all around me in this huge supermarket. Then I thought about all the other supermarkets across the country, then Europe, then the world. I started to have an internal panic attack at the thought of all this stuff. The packaging was the main source of my anxiety and what happens to it after we have used it all and throw it away. Then waste became another big concern and I started to google where my waste goes because I just cannot accept that there are enough holes in the ground for all the waste that every single human produces………then the food, the overconsumption, of not only food but also of anything you want (if you are in the Western World anyway). I am pretty sure that if I type into Amazon “Green Goblin with hairy boobies” I will be able to order one and receive it via Prime the next day……Amazon, all that packaging……all the trees. Wood, if you think about it, wood has been used to make stuff for hundreds of years, all the newspapers let alone houses, furniture…..why haven’t we ran out of it? Oh yeah…….we are running out.
What was happening to me in the supermarket those few years before the climate change crises was really taken seriously? I honestly feel like I have been picking up on something on some sort of energetic level when it comes to this huge and very real problem. I know obviously you don’t have to be a psychic to figure out what is happening here, but it’s the fact I couldn’t shake this feeling for so long, it would keep me up at night the thought of running out of resources and the destruction of our natural world and then, of course, us.
Perhaps it coincides with the fact I have a daughter and that I worry about her future. Sometimes on my really low days, I don’t see my daughter’s generation having their own grandkids….I feel like we literally have around 50 years of the human existence left……blimey, what a dark and awful post this is!! My normal positive self doesn’t want to show up for this debate for some reason.
I’m being lazy on this post because there are no facts or figures it is just the inner ramblings of my mind (sometimes these make the best posts). Out of everything, the waste issue really gets to me and people that drop litter really get to me like nothing else. The other day, I was at Liverpool Street Station in London when I saw a man and a boy sitting on a bench and the man dropped a sandwich carton on the floor and the comical thing was that he made out it was an accident, but it was such a rubbish attempt that his stupidity offended me and made me want to laugh in equal measure.
“Excuse me, is this yours?” I say to his shocked and surprised face.
“Do you live in your own waste at home? Who cleans it up after you, you smelly little man? Why’s it ok for someone to clean up after you? Are you better than me? Because I throw my rubbish away, why don’t you? Why are you lazy? Why don’t you care? You realise that when you drop litter it says more about your personality than just about anything ever could? It’s telling me that you think the world owes you a favour. It’s telling me that you take no accountability for your own actions. It’s telling me that you have zero motivation levels and no ambition or drive. It’s telling me you are lazy in relationships and put no effort in. It’s telling me you are ignorant and are actually a virus, you are what’s part of the problem, no, you are the problem”.
Of course, I didn’t say that to him, but that’s what I thought about for five minutes after I saw that man drop the litter. I should have said something, and I know that passive aggressiveness is doing nothing for my positive chakra balancing and even reading that back I can see that I’m being harsh to this guy, because all humans are the virus, it’s just some of us or more aware of it than others.
I have no idea why I chose to write about this today and I wish that it was more constructive, like me giving ideas about plastic alternatives or how to reduce my carbon footprint. I’m sure these posts are going to come soon……..just not today. Today I want to rant about a man on a bench who dropped litter and I wanted to punch his face.
Until next time,
Tanya
