ON MY MIND
A breath of fresh air By Paul Kandarian
REBOOT. That’s a popular word in technology. Your computer, iPhone, cable, Alexa, acting wonky, screwing up? Shut it off and turn it back on. Refresh. Another popular one, if a sluggish Google’s grinding your gears, refreshing your browser usually helps it get back up to speed. Renew. That’s more personal, usually referring to ourselves, taking a break, getting a spa treatment, meditating, doing the Zen thing and practicing mindfulness, all that stuff that gets us to slow down, relax, chill out. And now our planet is doing exactly that. One very good benefit of a very bad situation – the pandemic – is that the planet is cleaning itself, due to drastic drop in human activity that for centuries now has been bound and determined to destroy it. Newsflash: there is not one damn thing we can do to destroy the planet. The planet will destroy us long before we can destroy it. And some are saying the pandemic is doing just that. I’m not a conspiracist, nor do I believe in the invisible man in the sky, so I don’t buy the God-is-pissed theory, either. But the fact is, we have screwed up our home for a long time. You know how if you let your house go to crap, don’t do maintenance, don’t clean up, don’t fix that leaky roof or the holes in your windows or the crack in the foundation, it will eventually
collapse around you? Your mother always told you, “Clean up after yourself.” Now Mother Nature’s telling us the same thing. Because that’s where we’re headed, folks – whether you want to believe it or not, the major reason being global warming, something a lot of people still don’t buy. They are the naysayers, the deniers, the head shakers. I prefer the term “idiots.” Our home is warming up faster than normal, and that’s a fact. And it’s also a fact that it’s due to our neglect of the environment for a long, long time. The science is there. And understandable. Even to idiots. And when man takes a break from mucking up the environmental works, the planet doesn’t waste time getting back to a normal it knew for the longest stretch of its life, that stretch being when man wasn’t on it mucking up the environmental works. Consider this: the planet is 4.5 billion years old. Modern man has walked it upright for roughly 200,000 of those years. This from The Guardian as of this writing in early April: “As motorways cleared and factories closed, dirty brown pollution belts shrunk over cities and industrial centres in country after country within days of lockdown. First China, then Italy, now the UK, Germany, and dozens of other countries are experiencing temporary falls in carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide of as much as 40%, greatly improving air quality and reducing the risks of asthma, heart attacks, and lung disease.”
Chances are, we’ll get through the pandemic. And chances are, we’ll forget how clean our planet got while we were hunkered down inside not mucking up the outside.
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May 2020 | The South Coast Insider
