Little Annoyances
Living/Life is not a singular process. It is a continual series of little tweaks of action, major moves, great storms and ten-minute sun showers. If we reacted equally to everything that happens to us we’d go nuts. Example: a broken leg and an ingrown toe nail. Both injuries. One extremely painful, perhaps crippling, and debilitating for months, the other probably aggravating but not worth a trip to the doctor. There are many, many little annoyances every day of our lives. We can fight the battles against small injustices and illogical situations but to keep our mental health we’ve got to put the small problems of our existence into perspective. It is an ongoing battle.
We are constantly weighing the depth of our actions and reactions to the problems and perceptions in our daily life. Over-reacting to a small problem is just as disturbing as not reacting to a big problem. If you lose sleep over a $5.00 debt it is no better or worse than lying awake worrying about the U.S.A.’s trade imbalance with China. The end result is You Being Tired. A healthy person resolves to pay the $5.00 asap and goes to sleep. There is not much one can do about the Chinese/American trade imbalance except be aware of it and vote for people who can try to do something about it. That and buy American! But, still, lying awake worrying about it will not help.
Lately I have been wrestling with a worrying image that has been on TV and in the news a lot. Plastic.
Back in the good old days Dustin Hoffman in a film titled “The Graduate” is given some sage advice by a relative. Trying to get Dustin on a prosperous path in life the uncle ( I think it was an uncle) tells him the key to success in the future in just one word, “Plastic”. Back in the 1960’s plastic was a newish and mostly wonderful material and the uncle’s advice was what a lot of people and industries were insanely preoccupied with. Plastic would eventually become a ubiquitous component material in everything we use and consume. Packaging, tools, appliances, transportation (cars, planes, trains…)and if Dustin had taken his uncle’s advice he would, no doubt, have been in sync with the whole rest of the world and made his fortune with “Plastic”.
But like the Genie in the Lamp or the monster on Doctor Frankenstein’s operating table, once loosed on the world plastic production and consumption ran wild, and the side effects of its proliferation went unnoticed by the general public. We now know that the very qualities of the stuff-its versatility and indestructibility-threatens to change the qualities of our environment in both gross and subtle ways. The evening news shows us images of vast islands of garbage (composed mostly of plastic packaging) floating out at sea. These islands decimate marine life and decompose as they soak up sun and water. The islands make land and cover beaches with miles of decomposing plastic. It chokes out vegetation. It chokes out turtles and fish as they try to eat the floating film. And, now, we are beginning to see that it is starting to “choke us out” as well.
Dustin Hoffman may or may not have become a mogul in the burgeoning plastic boom of the 20th century but we do know that the fence he had installed in his back yard (made of plastic) lasted 15 years in the sun and then went into a land-fill. There it was exposed to ground water and sun and decomposed into microscopic units. The resultant product is now finding its way into every organic being on the planet. It is in our blood and the blood of the brown bear. It is in the tomato plants in my garden and the trees we cut and burn in our fireplaces. Discarded wrappers from vaping apparatus lie along the road but look but look more closely at the dirt by the side of the road. Not at the obvious plastic water bottles and beer cans and you can easily see tiny shards and granules of discarded, decomposing plastic in almost ever square inch. It is easy to be annoyed by roadside litter. It is so obvious, but shouldn’t we be more concerned by where that litter is going? It is going into us, biologically!
So, here is my little annoyance for today. I hate the plastic tags on my bananas. Do you know what I’m talking about? The plastic tags glued to the skin of my apple and pear. Isn’t it enough that every piece of fruit that one buys comes wrapped up in a plastic bag or box? That no one goes away from the supermarket without contributing to the growth of an insidious island of ocean borne plastic trash? Must we peal a plastic sticker off of each and every piece of fruit we want to eat? My compost bin is full of good things rotting away to make more good soil so I can grow good things and it is also full of little plastic stickers advertising “Chiquita Bananas” or “Mexican Avocados”. I am proud to be making compost and using it in my garden. I am irritated that those little stickers are in the soil where I have my plantings.
There is not much I can do about the invasion of plastics on Earth but I can do something…complain about those little stickers and I intend to do it from now on. I am writing to all of the producers/packers of produce and complaining. Keep your little plastic stickers off my food.
