A world made of glass
As you grow older in our blessed isle, the joys of childhood tug at the heartstrings. If memory serves me right, it was an epoch of peace and plenty. The best part of that golden age was that there was very little – if any – plastic in it. Most things of value as well as utility were made of gold, glass, metallic compounds or alloys, or wood and cloth. Bliss it was that dawn to be alive – to be young was very heaven!
But you can’t stop progress – because the world is full of folks who can’t abide or enjoy the status quo for more than a minute at a time… or for as long as it takes to say ‘peace be with you and your tribe.’ And as George Bernard Shaw once observed, “all progress depends on unreasonable people.”
In fact, I can still remember the tender well-meaning relative who pressed a slim but subversive Ladybird book titled ‘The Story Of Plastics’ into my trembling juvenile hands at the impressionable age of seven. My age at the time, not hers! Of course, I was almost instantly converted. Ladybird books are nectar to young minds – or were in that nostalgic era before the advent of Atari, PlayStation and PDAs of every persuasion. This particular tome was filled with the delights of that synthetic material, which can be moulded into films or filaments to make fancy objects from toys to trays to train engine regulator switches. Let me confess that I was corrupted by the sinfulness of plastic mostly because the illustration of its uses included automobiles and aircraft to boot…
Childhood ends like even the best of blissful dreams. Fascination with puerile things is transformed from base into precious metal in the crucible of adolescence. Adulthood brings its own set of rules, regulations and responsibilities.
The average Sri Lankan youth is far more concerned with sports, school careers and future prospects than preserving his or her environment – much less a planet in peril. We (not one of my generation of islanders being sheltered by a safer and more secure society at the time) suspected we’d drown in a sea of plastic.
Which reminds me of another poignant memory of student years: a poem by Robert Frost that’s perhaps more apposite than ever for these end times we live in…
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice; From what I tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say:
That for destruction ice is also great – and would suffice!
But it’s neither fire nor ice that consumes our beloved land today. And despite the potential of an island that no less than Lonely Planet only recently named as its No. 1 place to visit in 2019, a thing of beauty is not a joy forever. Far be it from me to mar these pages with the trials and tribulations that beset the isle where Serendipity was once found. But I must add plastic to the heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. And then hold my peace.
Each time I ask a steward not to bring me a straw or refuse the overly helpful checkout girl at the local supermarket who wants to pack my purchases in not one but two siri-siri bags, I do it in memory of those who died or lost their homes when our mountain of garbage collapsed on them.
And when I join some youthful do-gooders in a beach cleanup campaign, I remind myself that my motherland ranks among the worst five in the world in terms of being a plastic disposal menace.
The main problem with saving the planet though is not plastic but the people who use it. So I’m saying ‘no’ to my own mindless consumption. It is literally the last straw.