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I think I hate the planet.
When I was a kid I used to watch Captain Planet. I didn’t realize at the time that I was being brainwashed–duped by a cool suit and sweet rings–into identifying emotionally with an entity that is quite literally beneath me. The Earth. I might be the only one of my generation to have escaped this propaganda machine: my peers talk about global warming as though one of their dearest friends had a life-threatening fever.
Not recycling in the 21st century is like not going to church in the 19th century: it is not exactly breaking the law but there are plenty of people who would sign a petition to make it so. When my eco-freak roommate is out of town, I take impish pleasure in throwing away beer cans. But what about the heaps, the dumps, the garbage barges? I like to think of myself as participating in the largest cooperative sculpture in history.
Everyone says: “You know there are only two man-made structures visible from the moon–the Great Wall of China and the island of trash floating in the Pacific.” First of all, I don’t think either one of these facts is true. If anything, this adds credence to my jingoistic convictions about the world’s great nations: communists make walls, capitalists make trash. Refuse is, without a doubt, our largest export. I love throwing food away. Waste is the new American pastime. I am Babe fucking Ruth.
What are we going to do about global warming? The caps are melting, the seas are storming, the sky is falling! Meanwhile nobody has the cojones to tout the accomplishment. I Remember when they taught me about the Thoracic, Cretaceous, Jurassic etc. They showed me a clock which was scaled to demonstrate the infinitesimal fraction of time for which humans have been on the planet. Like, a second. Amoeba couldn’t do it, fish couldn’t do it, dinosaurs couldn’t do it–compared to us even that giant meteor that killed them all is a pussy. It only took us one second to mess this rock up irrevocably. It’s like a fight at a party and all these people are rushing in to break it up, break it up and see if that guy’s ok, I know CPR does he need to go to the hospital? Meanwhile I am in the corner asking, “did you see how hard he pummeled that guy?”
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