Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay
With all the brilliance and intellect the human race has cultivated over centuries, it’s inconceivable that someone has never invented a “revert” button, just in case we messed it up. It’s times like now when that button would be the most effective tool we have in providing us with an entire do-over because we’ve screwed it up so badly.
Sure, we have become exceptionally innovative and avant-garde which has helped us in the long run, but at what cost? And who gets left out in the cold when it's all said and done?
We love money so much it has turned us into terrible people.
Let’s get started, shall we?
We already know that plastic is destroying our planet, starting from the very bottom of the food chain. But did you also know that entire American cities that want to do the right thing and make a move to ban single-use plastics can be challenged in the Supreme Court and denied?
In Texas, the city of Laredo effectively banned the use of plastic shopping bags — until the courts overturned the ban. Why? Because of money.
The chemical giant, Exxon Mobil in Houston, is the Godfather of plastics in the USA, and there’s too much revenue in it for them to let a ban take place. So they stopped it.
Can you imagine the highest court overturning what is right and healthy, just because there’s money in it? Actually, yes you probably can. It happens all the time.
Speaking of plastics, did you know that the chemical agent BPA, which has been used in plastics for decades, is the possible culprit in male sperm counts decreasing by half since the 1950s?
When plastics came on the scene we started eating from it, drinking from it, and breathing it in. This has genetically modified our bodies over decades, to the point where we don’t function in the natural way we were born to.
Now we have thousands of couples with malfunctioning reproductive systems, spending their life savings to engineer new life. Partially because there’s money to be made in plastics. And we’re okay with it because of convenience.
Since we were all okay with it, the medical profession also became okay with inventing a fix for our follies. They can now fabricate your babies for you. It’s all just part of the flow.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Speaking of engineering new life, humans also seem to be okay with manufacturing animal lives to feed our lust for consuming them.
Animals are being engineered and mass produced, living short and stymied lives of torture, just because humans want that prime cut of veal. When did we stop being satisfied with a friggin' steak for dinner, from a cow who actually roamed in a field and ate grass?
When did a chicken nugget become so valuable that it needs to be made out of manipulated, mutant chickens?
When you step into a supermarket the first thing you might see is the produce department. Before seeing bins full of apples and oranges shoppers will see huge display cases full of pre-cut, prepackaged cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew melon, etc. All packaged in plastic containers.
Are we really this lazy that we can’t buy a whole piece of fruit and cut it? Would we really rather destroy the planet we live on just to save five minutes?
It appears so.
How is it that society has fallen so far away from the good old days? We’ve morphed into this world of lazy, materialistic, vanity-loving, hollow shells called humans.
Giants want money and they know we want to consume things as quickly and as easily as possible, no matter what the cost. We’re too lazy to do any of it ourselves so we’re willing to shovel our money into the overstuffed pockets of those who will do it for us.
When did we, as inhabitants of our own sacred planet, decide to start trading an honest life for a fast life? Our health for convenience? Our souls for simplicity?
Perhaps the ultimate insult in the entire pyramid of consumerism and ease of life, is that the humans who are living the most wholesome lives are the ones suffering the worst.
Money makes it easy for giants to manipulate the poverty stricken. Unlivable wages are dangled in front of the underprivileged who eagerly grasp at it, because hey, an unlivable wage is better than no wage at all. Small, local farmers from faraway countries earn 0.50 cents a day — four times lower than the global poverty line of $2.00 a day — to grow and manually harvest what turns into the chocolate bar that you easily spend $2.00 on.
Yet those local farmers are the only piece of humanity left who aren’t destroying the planet. They’re just out there in the bush, chopping away at cocoa pods with their bare hands and a machete. It’s not until their product reaches our side of the world that it contributes to global destruction.
Do you think for one second that the CEOs of the fanciest chocolate companies in the world, are giving a second thought to the farmer who grew the cocoa, but can’t even feed his family?
Image by Alexander Stein from Pixabay
I get it though. I understand that “industry” is what keeps a roof over my head and heat in my home when the temperature is sub-zero. Without industry we probably wouldn’t survive because we don’t know how.
I can’t help but wonder if said industry is what has crippled us in the first place. We have invented and innovated so far that we wouldn’t know how to survive without it, and that’s what should be worrisome to humanity at this point.
It’s not okay that such an imbalance exists on the planet, simply because of a lust for money.
Now that I’ve sat and actually put these thoughts into words, I won’t lie. I kind of hate us all. And I wouldn’t blame the planet Earth one bit if it decided to spontaneously revolt against mankind and kill us off.
The beautiful plot twist in the world destruction scenario is that the hard-working, poverty-stricken citizens would survive because they already know how to. They have to know how because we made it that way for them.
Those who were born into the slow, difficult, and laborious way of life will always survive based on skill.
We, on the other hand, don’t truly know how to do anything, including pacify a baby. Instead we shove a piece of plastic into its mouth and place it into a machine that does the rocking for us.
I’ll tell you what. If just one of those poverty-stricken people were given the tools to write and sell a how-to ebook on surviving the end of “easy” humanity, I’d buy it.