It’s Earth Day. Today.
Its also take your kid to work day. How did they get the two on one day? And who is they anyway? Like who allocates them? Mother’s day and Father’s day and Valentine’s day and Secretary’s day and Ocean day? My mother used to say, before my father ran off with her best friend, “every day is father’s day”. Personally I think every day should be Mother’s day. And Earth day and Earth Mother’s day and Mother Earth’s day. Really! We have, like, ozone holes and vanishing rainforests and melting ice, and oil spills and mountain top removal and fracking and extinct species, and air pollution and clean water shortage and now all that plastic in the oceans that kills everything from whales to birds to fish and eventually us, and all we have is ONE day! Only one day a year that is Earth day….
What bullshit!
One Day To Feel Good About Ourselves and the Environment Day is what today should be called, so tomorrow we can go back to our old ways of buying bottled Evian, forgetting to bring cloth bags to the market, leaving the lights on, driving instead of taking our bike or walking.
BUT
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe its arrogant to assume that we, as just another, be it rather pernicious species, have to assume the position of “saving the planet” when its only us who’s making the mess in the first place. Its a bit like beating your wife and then helping her with the ice packs and band-aids. Take a look at the last tsunami, the earthquakes, the volcano just last week and its easy to see that we the people, are, after all, pretty powerless, and that Mother Earth may just have her own plans to save herself.
And I don’t think she calls it “Human Species Day”.
What WE need is a Human Species Day. Atonement Day. Reflect humbly on who and what we are and correct our ways to save ourselves and each other.
(All of above said in the words of Michael Jackson: with the love…with the love…)