How to diagnose yet another infection

You know what eco-friendly means, but what about Trashy Person’s Disease? It’s not a virus, but is contagious and inherited. Everything from plastic sacks to coal-fired electrical generating plants is the result of TPD. It seems the infected level in our fair state is north of 75 percent.

Here is a way to tell if you are infected, and you don’t have to stick a swab up your nose halfway to your brain. On your big Friday grocery shopping trip to your local big box store, push your loaded cart with 15 to 20 plastic bags across a blank treeless parking lot to your car, and hesitate for a minute.

Then, while looking at your plastic-bag-loaded cart in the middle of a huge treeless parking lot, say “I live in the Natural State.” If you can utter that simple phrase while staring at two glaring environmental negatives, you are infected with TPD. If you are too embarrassed to say it, you are on your way to being healed, or maybe you are part of the eco-friendly herd.

Being part of the herd sounds familiar, since we’re busting our butts to get covid-19 under control by vaccinating enough folks to have herd immunity. Getting TPD under control is going to take an eco-friendly un-infected herd to hit the 70 percent mark before we can be the Natural State in reality and not in name only.

If we seriously take a hard look at our beautiful state, we can see room for a vast amount of improvement. How do we reach Natural State herd immunity of 70 percent if TPD is contagious and inherited? Children grow up to mimic their parents in dozens of ways; as you drive down the road and toss that beer can out the window with your kids in the back seat, you are infecting them.

The benefits that will come from reaching a 70 percent eco-friendly population are too numerous to mention, but consider this: Our state will gradually change, and while it won’t be immediate, there will be slow, steady improvement until we can say with pride that “We live in the Natural State,” and it will be because all those folks who once had TPD have been cured.

Our eco-friendly state will have trees in parking lots and no litter along roadways. Plastic bags will be a thing of the past, and the Arkansas Department of Transportation will change its name to the Arkansas Transportation and Sidewalk Department.

Medians in our interstate highway system will display thousands of new trees, sidewalks will line every highway through a town, and apex predators will be back in Arkansas’ woods.

You may ask: Richard, what have you been smoking?

Well, I figure if Coach Pittman can turn the last-place Hogs around, whip up on Texas, beat the Aggies, and win eight games, then a new attitude must make a lot of difference. It seems that attitude about anything is important, and the Hogs are a winning football team this year in large part because of attitude.

Coach Pittman deserves a lot of credit for that, and it shows in everything from the cheerleading to the starting lineup. Arkansas football is a great example of how a positive approach can make a huge difference.

Let’s examine some of our attitude problems. Based on the evidence (like roadside trash), we are seriously deficient in being eco-friendly. Do you have a real Natural State attitude? Are you eco-friendly?

Since we have a lot of folks who have already failed the Natural State Attitude Test, let’s look at what it will take to reach a 70 percent level of ecofriendly vaccinated citizens. It’s really like global warming, or what is more fashionable now, “climate change.”

As our world’s weather becomes increasing bizarre—plainly obvious because the earth is warming—the country as a whole begins to respond more positively, and the “I don’t believe in global warming” crowd is getting quieter.

Polls have shown that the recent series of droughts around the world (especially in California), violent tornadoes and hurricanes, and record temperatures have moved the peg to where discussions about climate change have become standard fare in political circles.

And when the arctic blast hit Arkansas last February, the majority of folks nodded when someone said climate change. The recent conference in Scotland indicates climate change has moved up from a theory to an absolute fact.

That’s the exact way we will become the true Natural State: by becoming aware of and concerned by the condition of our roadsides, streams, and forests. Even the state Game and Fish Commission will start managing our wildlife to return to an eco-friendly environment by restoring apex predators.

We’re not there yet. But don’t be discouraged, because 20 years ago the idea that you would bring your own shopping bag into a grocery store to keep from using a plastic bag was almost unheard of, and if you turned down a plastic straw in a restaurant, the wait staff would consider you strange and probably unstable.

Now, as our children look at our habits, and if those habits are eco-friendly, they will change their attitude about our environment. As we become more educated, the state will become more eco-friendly, because being educated changes attitudes.

When we start living eco-friendly lives, we will affect our families and friends, and as those folks become eco-friendly they will in turn have a positive influence on their families and friends. It’s a pebble-in-the-pond effect as the ripple spreads the message: Be eco-friendly.