Killing ourselves and others

Human trash kills
(Originally published November 2, 2006 on MySpace)

"I'm ready.... to begin chemotherapy."  I'm enraged every time I see that particular TV commercial.  What are they selling?  Medical drugs.  Why am I enraged?  Because it implies that viewers are fatalistic idiots, perfectly willing to accept the cancers that result from the polluted environment that they live in and, paradoxically, create.  Drug companies are delighted to see a diseased public.  They make money when we are ill, lots of money.  No commercials try to sell us solutions to reduce vehicle emissions or power plant pollution or anything else that would make the air we breathe or the water we drink or the food we eat less harmful.  No ads prod us to change our behavior to pollute less.  Instead we are encouraged to buy, buy, buy, and be insatiable consumers purchasing products that allow us to sit on our butts in sublime comfort while we breathe the poisons these products create.

1200 miles northwest of Honolulu, in the middle of the Pacific, is the oldest island in the Hawaiian island chain.  It is uninhabited and has been set aside as a preserve, meant to be a pristine example of the islands before man discovered them.  It is a natural bird sanctuary, and birds there have almost no fear of people, since they have hardly ever dealt with humans.  A group of photographers was sent there to document the island environment.  One large sea bird in particular became quite friendly with them.  One day it appeared abnormally listless, and the next day it died.  Because this seemed so strange, one of the photographers, who was also a biologist, dissected the bird to determine the cause of death.  The bird's stomach and intestinal tract were completely full of an incredible assortment of indigestible refuse, like bottle caps, Styrofoam bits, rubber tubing, and broken bits of plastic.  It had essentially died due to a blocked digestive tract.  In the middle of the vast Pacific ocean, human trash is so common in the water that birds die from eating it.

My mother once described me as "an angry young man" because I was always pointing out the problems with the status quo, the standard human way of doing things.  She would have preferred that I adopt an "ignorance is bliss" attitude, like most other people.  Unfortunately, once your eyes are open and really observant, there's no going back.  And you will be angry.  Our own activities are causing other living things all over the world to die, and we ourselves are among the victims.  Unless we are all angry, there will be little motivation for us to change our destructive lifestyles.  It's time to be angry with eyes wide open.



Update (June 24, 2014):  Another video quietly censored.  You're supposed to watch bogus reality shows on TV rather than watch the true reality of our world.  True reality is censored.  True reality leads to the truth, and the people controlling you and the world don't want you to know the truth.  The truth would make you very angry, angry enough to fight back.  They don't want that.

Here is another video showing the deadly effects of plastic pollution on other living things.  It's called Bird Island - Plastic versus Nature.  We will see how long it takes for this video to be censored.


 

Wasting our energy

First, we dig up a lot of rock and crush it.  This takes time, effort, and very heavy equipment that consumes a lot of fuel, which is burned in the engines.  That consumes a lot of oxygen that living things like ourselves need to breathe, but we never worry about that.

Then the rock is transported to a factory, often far away, sometimes across the ocean.  More time, effort, and fuel is consumed.

At the factory, a very hot (200 degrees C) mixture of water and lye is mixed with the crushed rock.  The particulates are filtered out and thrown away.  Lots of energy is used to heat the liquid initially and dispose of the particulate matter.  The caustic liquid is then allowed to cool, causing a solid precipitate to settle out of the liquid.  The precipitate is collected and dried, then it's heated to 1000 degrees C to melt it (lots more energy consumed here).

While melted in this hot liquid state, a strong electric current, using millions of amps factory-wide, is passed through the liquid (lots more energy required for that).  A pure, molten metal is produced.  By the way, the required electrical energy is so great, you need to have your own hydroelectric dam nearby.  I won't even try to explain how much time, effort, and energy was needed to create that hydroelectric dam.  Needless to say, it's HUGE.

The metal is cooled and rolled into sheets.  The sheets are transported (more energy) to another factory where they are formed into containers (more energy), filled with filtered water (more energy to obtain and transport that) and corn syrup (lots more energy to produce, grow, transport, and process that), and then shipped all over the world (OMG, still more energy).

We're almost done.

Individuals, using machinery called SUVs (weighing tons that took enormous amounts of time, effort, and energy to manufacture), purchase and consume lots of fuel (itself produced at enormous energy and transportation costs) to travel to distribution points and purchase the metal containers full of syrup water.  All of these purchases require money, which itself required vast amounts of time, effort, and energy to obtain.  All of these smiling individuals return to their home areas, where they store the containers until they are transported to other locations, opened, and eight ounces of syrup water, known to be disruptive to the proper biochemistry of the body, is ingested.

Then, get this, the flawless container made of highly refined, nearly pure elemental aluminum metal, is THROWN AWAY, after only a single use!  It is often crushed and returned to the earth in a landfill!

If that isn't collective insanity, then I don't know what is.

Surprise, there is also an energy crisis.  And an environmental crisis.  And a health crisis.  And an economic crisis.  And non-stop war, which is a behavioral crisis that greatly contributes to all the other crises.

Geez-us Crises!

We do it for this.