that turd of a bird
a (spoken word) poem on starting to care
so you hear from the news,
your teachers, your religious leaders,
your friends, and not so friendlies,
you hear that the environment,
it isn’t doing so well.
that it needs saving,
and so you should be behaving,
because it doesn’t need saving from itself,
but from you.
as the death of the human species as we know it
and environmental catastrophes appear on the horizon,
as you hear how the plastic of your six pack of beer
strangled some cute baby turtle,
that the ocean is anything but clear in the great pacific garbage patch,
the room darkens, and whether fair or not
a voice says:
it is up to you now, we fucked up.
your luck is up.
center stage, now! start. to. care!
and as I move stage left to distract from
what arguably caused the distraught millennial to soil his pants,
i need to ask:
why do we care?
in general,
what is it about something that
grabs
our attention,
us,
guides us towards action or inactions.
through contractions of the heart,
compactions of thought brought to you by
this, cavernous thing,
your brain!
and in the name of being green
it says to: abstain!
from eating meat, from taking showers longer than 4 minutes, from reboiling you kettle, from turning your heating up, indulging in a single use cup…
rather:
eat up, be tough and say fair enough to higher prices, embrace the crisis of not having industrial eggs, or meat or cheese every day, it may bring you down to you knees,
because cheese,
and eggs…
but please,
it begs,
(as you chew your juicy and delicious egg mcmuffin to the rhythm of it’s list of demands),
don’t you care?
and you know that you do…
but why does it have to be so damn hard?
but then again, you might encounter or be this person:
ah yes, you’re a vegan!
i too, follow the credence of the vegans,
but what about those heathens over there?
they are faking, they’re not even taking the simple steps!
the freedoms they are leaving themselves…
they just don’t care.
or what about this person:
don’t be mean! be green!
don’t buy into consumerism
into simple comforts,
do try and be a consumer driven by
a new fashion
a passion for saving the environment.
sounds chique, right?
you couldn’t dare not care, would you?
would you?
but yeah, what is it about this lifestyle, this choice
why do people care about the environment?
you might say,
because they know it is not an option not to.
to wait,
to debate,
conflate the disaster through inaction.
the intergovernmental panel on climate change has already announced,
with an absurdly high probabilistic statistic, that
we are the cause of climate change.
that we are not following the laws of nature,
leaving fractures in its statures.
with sea levels rising,
seasons sliding back and forth,
changing biodiversity,
a universality emerges with the recipe of change.
the message: nothing will be as it was before,
and it is our fault.
but still, why should you care?
so sure, you might be the master of disaster,
but inevitably you ask yourself:
why should we care if summer starts earlier,
or winter lasts a little longer,
or if the bird the size of a turd
dies out in a bout of: no more, I’m flapping out!
there will always be another bird,
even if it is just a third of species that are left in the end.
which, in the end, might seem optimistic to come to pass….
it’s tossable, you might say, how can my reboiling of a kettle,
cause this… this. DOOM
and besides I’m doing fine here, it doesn’t feel real
here,
then you go through the news real on
the other places and faces
and they tell a very different story:
they might not have a house to boil a cuppa in
as it is engulfed by the ever encroaching waves.
nature rising against us.
not just in a poverty stricken third world country
that you might have just imagined,
but in a somewhere like Miami Beach, USA.
not even one of the most powerful nations responsible
for what is arguably turning into quite the impressive tragedy….
not even they are safe.
given enough time,
no one will be.
do you care now?
are you ready to stop pollution for the improvement of the human:
we value ourselves and therefor need to value the thing that sustains us.
it’s a must.
we need to save the environment to save ourselves,
because even if it doesn’t get you now
it will get you somehow, somewhere, later, so they say.
but even now you might want to approach all this from a different angle,
because adopting an anthropocentric perspective would mean,
as I paraphrase from someone wiser than me:
to see, read, and value the human chapter in the book of life
as the only one worth reading.
to value our grain of a brain and our lumps of flesh
over the world and everything in existence.
it just seems plain silly to claim to be the epicenter of all meaning in the universe.
there is just so much more out there, and so much that we,
you or i,
don’t know.
so many things that aren’t contained by this human experience of ours.
because i know the things that i don’t know can’t fit in my hands, my brain, my heart, my legs.
they would burst the seams of what this body is,
trying to encompass, the infinitely unknown space they actually deserve.
and guess what? that’s okay.
we are allowed to be small,
we are allowed to be limited,
we are allowed to be a part of something larger.
just as long as we aren’t apart from it.
the world may be full of unknowns and unclear conclusions,
fake news,
in which everyone and no one has a monopoly on truth,
but I am counting on the things that I do know.
i know people care.
i know people dare to fight for the things that
make themselves and the ones around them feel
more alright.
that we can make a better place if we start from there.
yes that sounds cheesy as duck,
but please me in thinking that’s just fine if we make the world a better place,
even if its through unripe rhymes and mangled metaphors.
I know that the sky is blue, at least some of the time,
that me and you need love,
affirmation,
purpose,
that there are people who can’t bear to not care about meeting the world where it’s at.
you might be saying that living with lifestyle confinements for the climate
seems like the least we can do to protect
the me,
and the you,
and blue of the sky
and the greens of the grass
and so,
have I answered my own question?
why do we care?
why do I care?
i find it is still difficult to answer.
part of me thinks that it isn’t fair to ask at all,
because where do you draw the line between
caring
and not?
because there is no reason in particular why we should
opine that that pine in particular, within a forest of trees of infinite design,
and in fact that dandelion, in a field of myriad possibilities,
and that squirrel of all things…
that they should keep existing.
regardless of whether you think you should care anthropocentrically or biocentrically,
drawing more and more concentric circles around and around and around the things that we don’t know…
even if you believe that we shouldn’t dare not to care…
it can all feel like such a mess.
such a disaster.
so broken.
to care about living in a world where so much has gone wrong,
with worse times on the polluted, not so blue horizon…
it can hurt.
but among all this mess, this pain, this worry
i just want to ask you to follow me to the center of
my circling and unclear mess of purpose and reason.
to my place of calm.
consider this:
it feels like knowing, as I walk
through my favourite forest,
trees tall,
leaves lazily dancing with the rays of sun
soil buffering my soft footfall.
i breath a clean breath in,
out,
while the birds sing their favourite song…
it feels like knowing that i don’t want see this
gone.
in the sliver of chance that I might not be able to walk
through my favourite forest
and hear that turd of a bird on that pine tree in particular
i start to care.
