Forgive me for this non-picture book review related post. But I recently started a new fellowship with Climatebase. It’s been a lifelong dream or shall I say worry about the earth that led me here. I nearly majored in Environmental Science, but I was never good at the left-brain stuff so I ended up with an English major, Ethnic Studies minor and later went to grad school to get my Masters in Counseling Psychology. This fear of the earth’s health never left, however, and only grew stronger the older I got, as I became a mother, and as natural disasters became a frequent experience.
The reason why I’m writing about this is I am finally understanding the bigger picture of all my seemingly unrelated interests.
Everything we do affects everyone else.
When I learned that big corporations were intentionally dumping toxic chemicals into a rainforest far away from where they lived, I got that. I got that this is important to get not just for the environmental aspect, but for the psychological one and that in return affects our children. Everything we believe, that books should be banned, that it is okay to kill and destroy indigenous land and people, that the ends justifies the means, that people care about their own pockets, and companies care about the bottom line-that all affects us.
Everything we do and believe affects everyone else because we are all human beings living on one planet. That is the whole point of life isn’t it? To get that. That’s the moral of every classic movie and book. The good vs the evil. The villain and the super hero.
Wealthy executives who do things like that. Dictators. Bad people. They do bad things because they don’t get that what they do affects them. Or if they do, then they need help.
Those who don’t get that, don’t realize that destroying a part of the planet will eventually catch up to them. If not them directly, their grandchildren. It already has.
In the end it’s not a movie we’re dealing with that if we’re positive and hopeful will have a happy ending. The truth is we’re on the verge of killing the planet. We’re destroying hope and happy endings for our children. We’re doing it so we can get first class on an airplane for a company that makes discomfort part of its strategy to get more money in their pockets.
Technology has made it easier to distance ourselves from one another. We’ve forgotten the golden rules of do onto others…
We’re focusing our attention on the wrong things. We’re turned into ourselves instead of taking care of one another. Children don’t need us to protect them from picture books that share our history and culture. They need a healthy earth with good clean air and water, and enough food to eat and shelter. They need to feel safe in school. They need to know the adults are tending to that and not their own pockets.
So forgive me for ranting on these controversial issues or don’t. But it’s important to look at what we’re doing and why we’re doing it because everything we do affects everyone. And everything everyone does affects us.
