Tomorrow, National Poetry Month and #earthday pass like planets in conjunction.
I understand why poetry needs a month. All respect to my poet friends, it's a niche pursuit. If those who love poetry don't organize to remind most everyone else it's still here, maybe poetry as we've known it turns into something else.
Go, poets.
Earth Day, however… It just doesn't make any sense.
When I was a kid adults liked to tell this joke on children. Can't guess how often I heard it growing up, adults liked to rub it in.
A child asks, "We've got Mother's Day and Father's Day. How come there's no Kid's Day?"
"Because every day is children's day." Ka-boom. Welcome to life on the run, kid.
But Earth Day?
As if each and every day of earthly life on this dear blue world isn't that already?
Absolutely I honor those generations of activists that've carried us all thus far, as regards the tending of the world. Rachael Carson and others are giants astride earth's history.
And I get the necessity of using symbolism to grab some attention, too. It's what we do.
Then considering all the stupid stuff I once was taught as gospel truth, it's a long way we've come in a remarkably short time. People of good will must always remember that, while laboring at the rock of ignorance, greed and shortsighted human folly, so to someday rest upon a more sustainable landscape.
Except because we still rally around a symbolic day that exists to annually remind us without Earth as we know it there'd be no us at all, then the hard road already traveled by those who came before us isn't near enough.
Not fast enough. Not smart enough. Unsustainable.
Every day is Earth Day.
Take that, post industrial civilization. Time to grow up, kid.
Go life. With or without us.
Great post, Frank. Will we ever learn to respect and care for the only place we'll ever call home? Mars? I don't think so. I heard an analogy some years ago that I've never been able to get out of my head since. It compared the human race to a virus, with global warming the fever the planet was running as a result of the infection. Some analogies are pretty close to spot on.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I remember a version of that analogy. Always thought it apt.
ReplyDeleteUndoubtedly, as a race we've soon some serious hell to pay. But the young folk, who were weened on a fantastically better knowledge base than I was, seem to fully understand the dire stakes and soon it'll be them with their hands on the levers of power, leading the way. So...there's that.