Better Opportunities, But A Worse Planet

I stand, washing out an empty bottle of hot sauce to prepare it for recycling, and wonder how clean it actually needs to be. “How do they get the paper label off,” I think, and “whatever gets the label off will surely get the leftover hot sauce I’m scrubbing by hand,” but I don’t stop, because maybe it doesn’t. 

I read that glass takes a million years to disintegrate. I think about this small glass bottle in my hands, and the trillions of similar ones sitting in recycling centers and landfills, and I become sad for this world, and for my son who may not have glaciers to visit with his children if things continue as they are. I want future generations to be able to stand on top of the world, and see snow there, even during summer months. 

As I watch Greta Thunberg’s speech, I feel hope for future generations. It’s people like her, and Emma Gonzalez and her fellow Parkland survivors who give me hope that one day, a mom like me won’t have to sit in her therapist’s office seeking solutions to stop catastrophizing about all of the terrible things that could happen. That are for-real happening. 

“These things weren’t an issue 100 years ago,” I think. And it’s true. In pioneer days, they weren’t buying new computers and smartphones and having to dispose of old ones. They probably made hot sauce from scratch and stored it in a container that’s reused over and over. They probably only had a few glass jars. They made their clothes, and weren’t contributing to deforestation by ordering online.

There weren’t lock-down drills at school, and new mass shootings in the news. Like, ever. They never had mass shootings. Parents had worries, for sure, but they weren’t afraid.

For these things, I yearn for the planet that once was. A shooting was something that happened only after you loaded up your gun with powder. Nobody had weapons that could kill dozens in a blink.

Landfills weren’t full of old computers and televisions, and everything was re-used because it had to be. 

Better Opportunities, But A Worse Planet

While I long for the days of a simpler, pioneer life, I also don’t. Back then, if a kid had two broken bones, he probably had his arm wrapped up, and when a bone became displaced a week later, nobody knew. They’d certainly not known how to put pins in that arm, or that without that particular surgery, the kid would have pain for the rest of his life.

Back then, women were lesser than men. Not that we’re not still working on it, but we can vote, and have jobs that pay us almost as much as a man in the same position. A person of color was likely rarely seen on the pioneer trail unless he or she was a slave. We’re still working on bigotry too as a world. On spreading the message that black lives matter.

We’re still working on a lot. I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole (again), but we have a ways to go with having children in cages. And so much more…

While I know my carbon footprint is much larger than a pioneer woman from The Little House On The Prarie days, I also know that my son (and most kids in the first world) have respect for women.

For life.

That when he was little and had two friends named Jeremy, that when asking which was which, he’d ask “the peach one or the brown one?” and both were equal. They remain so. 

So while I mourn for the burning on our planet, and the melting of glaciers, I also rejoice for the new awareness we seem to collect as caring humans. I rejoice at there being programs to help teach children with special needs. They’re certainly not perfect yet, but in pioneer days, I’m pretty sure kids with learning differences weren’t in school at all. Even in the 70’s and 80’s when I was a youngster in school, I didn’t know anybody with autism, Down Syndrome, or cerebral palsy.

I’m glad kids today know others with differences. They’re better for it.

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This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post, using the photo prompt “Pioneer” provided by the fabulous Mardra Sikora.