A few midnight environmental lines:

I don’t know if it is me, my reality, reality itself, or only the predestined randomness of circumstances, but sometimes I feel –like an inner subterranean river– that a change (of paradigm, thought, Cosmo vision) is imminent: either we socially evolve, or we succumb, drowned by smog, filled to the top with rubbish and with our landscaped copied and pasted over there, the voice of nature rumbling down the hill. Fauna and flora exiled and enslaved around the world. Imprisoned inside our madness.

What`s most sad of all is that, if we fail, if we finally succumb, there are tons of people who will never have noticed what happened…  consumption has always been limitless, but we never knew why. We never asked ourselves why we consume what we consume; do I really want to consume this? do I really need it?

Two o’clock in the morning: the street absolutely empty… I walk, getting home after a long day (who does not have one of them from time to time?) and I come across a night shift worker, a good guy, a street sweeper of the city. A knitted hat, a pair of globes, jacket, headphones, humming a tune as a mantra for the job. He goes across the streets, every single night, letting the sun rise and shed its light only over the roof tops, the urban woods and the green grass which appears intermittently along the paths of the quiet towns of the center of this Latin-American country; leaving our streets clean, helping minimize floods which get worse through the negligence of the people who throw rubbish to the floor, as if it will be magically swallowed by it: the asphalt gobbling up the rubbish (yeah, right). I mean, do you really need to dump it in the floor?

The old lady arrived pissed off…

I only saw her for 40 seconds. I will not describe her because, if I do so, I will not be able to do it without letting a few prejudices I felt aside, but 40 seconds were enough. She arrived pissed off, I was saying, when she saw that another car was parked right beside hers with no space for her to out. She checked if her car was scratched, she mumbled a few words, got into her fancy car with even more anger and, to end it, she lowered her polarized window, just a little bit, and threw a paper to the street with complete impunity. She then left quickly with her car, probably taking her sad routine elsewhere.

A friend of mine did not understand –when he saw me getting mad in the street while picking up that same piece of paper– how I could get mad with that lady. “Let it be! Don´t lose it!” he told me… but the old lady doesn´t know (and does not value) the work and energy that it takes to do that piece of paper that wrapped her chewing gum and threw it to the ground as a planetary-gigantic-trash-bin.

Two twenty seven in the morning… I am still talking with the street sweeper: “Is that people don’t seem to care about anything, I see it every day.” And I believe him, but without losing the utopian hope that other kind of people exists. New human beings with higher levels of awareness, with greater depth of thought, willing to integrate actions.

We are the ones building a new reality, making our reality change first, in order to try and spread the word to the rest…

And then you have the ones who have the courage of doing what they say they do. Like Ezequiel Benvenuto, a friend and partner of studies. He asked me to spread the word to you because next Tuesday, in Santa Rosa, there is going to be a workshop held on native plants in the Bicentennial Museum for which, the organizers, needed plastic pots for the plant which will be delivered at the end of the workshop. To achieve this, Ezequiel went to the exit of the cinema in a cold night and recollected 350 plastic bottles, with the help of the employees of the cinema who were keen on helping for the cause of planting trees.

I am just saying, thinking, I leave it latent in my head for a while nearly at three o´clock in the morning, as I am finally getting home. I must wake up in a while for university. But I leave it there, latent, while I try to get some sleep… we can change things easily, we only need attitude and recognize ourselves as makers of our reality.

Until next week.

Brian Longstaff.-

Bibliography:

Pictures extracted from Google, but I wanted to highlight these two cites: www.madtly.com and www.santosmoreno.wordpress.com.

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