A previously unpublished rant

This is something I wrote a few weeks back, kind of similar in theme to the article below. I thought I had posted it already, but I don't see it on the blog. So here it is:

It's funny this world of convenience we live in. For example, imagine the amount of energy and material it takes to make every plastic water or soda bottle you buy and casually dispose of. Little toxic bombs in everybody's hands. But there is no complaint about this phenomenon. When the price of gas goes up a few cents, or when the average temperature of Earth goes up a few degrees there is hysteria and global conferences called. What is really going on is that people are not spending enough time thinking about how they are living. A few cents more at the pumps doesn't add up to too much, no one's a hundred percent that fixing the carbon problem will reduce the temperature, but goddamn it if we washed a glass or a fork once in while would it kill us?

Sometimes I like to think of how people fit in the overall plan of evolution. Where are we compared to the dinosaurs and the death of the Sun. Will other beings someday mine down to our civilization, using are garbage dumps as an energy source in a time where the Sun's rays are starting to ebb a bit. Are we just some wonderful interim experiment of what happens when you take the two elements of life--the Adam and Eve, if you will--and cast them into an environment such as our own.

What puzzles me a bit is our insistence that for in order for intelligent life to exist on other planets they must have conditions like our own. A stable atmosphere, a moderate temperature, water. Well what if the seeds that scatter to those stars become other beings; what if they adapt to rivers of lava and million mile an hour winds. I tell you something, we wouldn't stand a chance against those boys if they decided to wage intergalactic war.

I can see how some people just don't care that much about what they do. Their lives are consumed by who they will be, rather than who they are. I suppose it is a perfectly natural, and perhaps essential trait on the grand scale. But the problem is that there are so many good people trying to be more than they aught, and too many great brains out there bent on convincing them. If there was half the energy it took to tell people to buy Gucci or Baskin Robbins put into a campaign about how all bottles should be reused as often as possible, it would be topsy-turvey and insane, but I for one would like to see it.

Right now I am drinking a bottle of 7-Up, one of many I have consumed over my life time. I think of the massive populating of this place over the last 200 years. How it has become profitable to put a soda in a plastic bottle designed for disposal. What a short and crazy trip from staking claims to living in big urban centres. That's what Canada is, the great land grab. A new land, claimed by a shrewd crew of English traders and an hearty bunch of French settlers. And then of course there are the founding peoples. A diverse group of nations, many of whom were subjected to harsh forms of cultural, if not actual genocide, that live among us today. When one adds the many Asians, Africans, Arab and Island people that come here it makes for quite an international stew.

That is what we should be proudest of. Not our seat in the exclusive G7 club, not even our hockey championships (although we should be damn proud of those). What we should be proudest of, and work hardest at, is the fact that we are all people from different places. And assuming our species can weather a few extra degrees, and the continuing possibility of all out nuclear holocaust, in a few hundred years we'll all be Irish-Polish-Tahitian-Jamaican-Tasmanian-Burundi-Cree-French-Korean and so on.

Now we are all here in this new free for all land that no one really knew was here (except for the original peoples of course) a land that is full of resources and so much space. Endless space with a great big Jambalaya of humans who like to drink soda from plastic bottles and drive cars. Most of us live in a few very concentrated spots near the southern boarder and would never dream of doing otherwise.

But being a pissy-pants about how other people live gets boring sometimes. It's not easy being a curmudgeon. Sometimes I like to just live too. Like yesterday when we took the holiday Monday and went to the beach. Those are the days when I can just hang up that bitter old critic and dig into life. Watching people, playing Frisbee having a mini barbecue on the grass at Bird's Hill's fake lake. That's what life is all about, the rest, quite frankly is nonsense.