Let’s be good stewards of the environment
In response to Environmental fund on cards, Frank Sterle Jr says: Careless individual consumers threaten communities’ natural environments.
Too many of us still recklessly behave as though we are inconsequentially dispensing our non-biodegradable waste into a black-hole, in which it is compressed into nothing.
Indeed, I, myself, notice everytime I discard trash, I receive a reactive springcleaning-like sense of disposal satisfaction. Hell, I even receive that sense, albeit far more innocently, when deleting and especially double-deleting email.
It is like it can always somehow be safely absorbed into the air, water, and land (ie out of sight, out of mind).
I will never forget the astonishingly short-sighted, entitled selfishness I observed about five years ago, when a television news reporter randomly asked a young urbanite wearing sunglasses what he thought of government restrictions on disposable plastic straws.
“It is like we are living in a nanny State,” he retorted with a snort, “always telling me what I can’t do.”
Astonished by his shortsighted little-boy selfishness, I wondered whether he would be the same sort of individual who would likely have a sufficiently grand sense of entitlement — ie “like, don’t tell me what I can’t waste or do, dude!” — to permit himself to now, say, deliberately dump a whole box of unused straws into the nearest waterbody, just to stick it to the authorities who would dare tell him that enough is enough with our gratuitous massive dumps of plastics into our oceans (which are, of course, unable to defend themselves against such guys seemingly asserting self-granted sovereignty over the natural environment), so he could figuratively middle-finger any new government rules with a closing, “There! How d’ya like that, pal!”
His carelessly entitled mentality revealed why so much gratuitous animal-life-destroying plastic waste eventually finds its way into the natural environment, where there are few, if any, caring souls to immediately see it.