IF YOU WANT TO HAVE AN “EARTH DAY”

So here’s an “Earth Day” story for you. Not a few hours ago I was walking home, and there’s this place where the sidewalk curves on a hill making a blind spot for pedestrians, where as I rounded it I literally tripped on the sprawling body of a passed out bum.

Now, even a cry baby like me is fairly accustomed to walking past people on the street, but there’s something especially disturbing about stepping over someone who looks like he might be dead. So I stopped and asked him if he was OK, if he needed anything, etc. and he said verrrrrry slowwwwwly (because severe alcoholics have a really hard time speaking), “I need to get out of here.”

Did he want help moving onto the grass? Did he want to call someone?

“NO,” he clarified, “I need to get out of HERE.” And he rolled his eyes around, indicating the whole fucking world. And I was like, Jesus brother, if you only knew how many people felt that way.

But most those people use different drugs and have wider networks of support, so we don’t fall into the cracks as literally as this particular person. This very sad, extremely sensitive person whose tolerance for planet Earth is so maxed out that his mind begs to be anywhere else, all the time.

Now, I’m not trying to like, brag that I saw the humanity of a homeless man, OK? I know how it might sound, but that’s a pretty low standard for giving out gold stars imho. I’m sharing this because I KNOW this planet could be so, so much better than it is. One that doesn’t constantly drive delicate souls to their worst selves, or throw people away who’ve come on hard times, or actively encourage folks to climb on top of others and shit down their throats like we’re factory farm chickens.

But we don’t have that better world because we accept tons of bullshit as “reality,” like the inevitability of homelessness, poverty, and war. That bullshit may seem to be about politics and religion, but really it’s about our struggle as a species to fit in with our environment — a puzzle that politics and religion were invented to solve (with very limited success).

So if you want to talk about distribution of wealth, you have to talk about the habitats we convert into “resources”, you have to talk about the other life forms we rob to create our capital in the first place, you have to acknowledge a correlation between the dystopian methodologies that feed our bodies and the dystopian social structures those bodies act out.

And if you want to have an Earth Day, you can’t separate matters of social justice from ecological ones, because they all fester in the same pot of human sadness over the fact that deep down, we know we’re Doing It Wrong. Whether or not we think about it, we know it in our bodies, because they’re made from other bodies that we poison and abuse.

The more we ignore that sadness, the easier it is to point at those who feel it most deeply, see what it does to them, what it drives them to, and say, “Oh gross, what a fuck up.”

And then we keep moving, right? Telling ourselves those pathetic people are inevitable and best ignored, just like our own deeply pathetic, self-numbing sadness; telling ourselves we’re not collectively stumbling through existence just as shit-faced, flailing in uncoordinated self-defense or pissing ourselves in the open for all of Nature to see.

But we are.

And while that’s a very unflattering portrait, my point is I don’t think that makes us a bunch of gross fuck ups. I don’t think we should step over ourselves and keep walking. I think we deserve to be happy here.

And so does every body else.