Growing up in the late ’80s, early ’90s it was commonplace to throw your garbage out of your moving car; this was so you could keep your vehicle orderly, clean, healthy, at the expense of everyone else. As a teenager, I, on principle, took the opposite approach; purely out of rebellion, I joined our school’s Environmental Club, not because I particularly cared about our shared environment, rather that I reveled in being different from my parents.
One day, while getting debris off school grounds, I remember singing “Maria” from “The Sound of Music” to help pass time; litter-picker in hand, halfway through trying to “solve a problem like Maria,” it struck me, if everyone stopped throwing their garbage from their car, I could be planting flowers in the school garden, instead of doing whatever nonsense I had unknowingly committed myself to doing year after year.
There on, I observed people as they threw their lipstick-stained cigarettes and chewed Bazooka Joe from their windows, rolling them back up like nothing happened. That’s when my initial mischievousness transformed into an unexpected love, as if I was born 15 years too late; I figured, had I been born betwixt and between late ’60s, early ’70s, when the EPA began, the shared collective would have had a chance, rather than the societal unraveling I found myself in as part of the “whatever” generation.
No one cared it would take decades for the Earth to try to biodegrade newly introduced synthetics, or about the unnatural stress caused on the soil because of their willful disengagement of the common good; as every window rolled up, no one thought twice about the real-world fragments their behavior would leave behind in the shared drinking water. Wanting to be untouched, they reasoned they were morally separate from the world, not bound to share responsibility in paying attention to what was happening around them.
As I sit here and reflect on the current zeitgeist, I can’t help but be transported back to my misspent youth and the moment when I realized that this planet is all we have, we are all we have. I feel like I am still a befuddled teenager, yet now I’m wondering if Captain Von Trapp was always a trap, as my daydreams of becoming Maria fade, thinking of how I can best help my neighbors.
While I don’t have all the answers, I do know that we must find a way to talk to each other. I fear the cumulative effect of not finding the time to honestly listen to one another, not trusting those who love us, to talk with us, because we know better, results in an omnicidic failure of civilization itself, led by the worst sorts of litterbugs, whose thermonuclear garbage they will undoubtedly throw out of their windows, leaving us a forgotten footnote to history.
We must surrender our posturing, our imagined self-importance, our belief that we should be comfortable with where we’re at, not seeking any input or help from others as long as our lives are clean and tidy. Yes, talking with each other may be messy, knowing no one wants to have to wade through their own garbage, especially when it is far easier to roll up your window and keep driving. I deeply believe we are better together, sharing our lives alongside each other. What is happening at this moment in time needs all of us to pay attention for we can no longer ignore the world, as the impact of our disengagement will find its way into our homes sooner than we think.
Zoe Argos is a Greeley resident.
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