How does a good person celebrate Earth Day? Not with moist presents and mud cakes. There's no fossilized manual you dig up on your 13th birthday, detailing the ancient rituals performed by generations of knuckle-dragging earthlings. So you start guessing, hoping that another holiday activity will somehow fit. But how? By shooting off fireworks into the sky with the distant hope of piercing the ozone layer? I doubt it. This is viewed as tone deaf on a day meant for deep environmental reflection. How about watching as one after another punctured aerosol can explodes, sending shards hurling towards the heavens? While a well-tested generic holiday tradition, it’s also in poor taste. Those cans have a very real and important function. Eating a thick, hearty bowl of beef-fed grass may be fine for a citizen desperate for ruffage, but it’s hardly a public show of planetary solidarity. And French kissing an oak tree, as sensual as it sounds, is probably best reserved for Arbor Day (April 24th for those wondering how long their bark-hued lipstick will last). We’re all confused, okay? We should do something a bit more meaningful in honor of our cozy home.
Many rekindle their love affair with recycling on April 22nd. But this shouldn't be limited to cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and newspapers. When newspapers are for housebreaking animals, lighting grills and turning into fashionable rain hats. Not reading. Not anymore.
Much like a drizzle chapeau made out of damp newsprint, Earth Day is for recycling bad ideas. The worst ones you can think of. Ideas that never made sense, but made people shiver, cry and sneeze. Not half-way decent ideas you yearn to see in action, but terrible, stinking, rotten ones. Ones that would make great compost material if given the chance. These are the ideas that deserve another opportunity to decay. They are better for the planet, too. Bad ideas are natural, often the result of mass delusion and genuine laziness. It'd be a terrible waste not to reuse them.
Whereas great ideas seem to come from a different universe entirely. You and I didn’t build the pyramids or figure out spaceflight. The folks who did - Newton, Einstein, Rosie O’Donnell – seem to exist above the fray. They’re human, but they’re not human. Originality is creepy, lacking references and an ability to comprehend. I prefer things that are easy to digest, like day-old oatmeal that’s been sitting on the countertop sunbathing.
The trouble with groundbreaking concepts is how taxing they are on the human body. It’s much easier to not think about something. Not only the individual who comes up with it either. Great ideas disturb the masses, those people who can’t think of anything mildly intelligent themselves. Pre-existing bad ideas require no extra effort to reinstitute. Leaded gasoline isn’t something I need to figure out. It’s already been done for me.
And if something was a bad idea 50 years ago, oh boy is it a really bad one today. It’s grown some mold and moss after decades of abuse and neglect. Because there’s nothing worse than a truly evergreen idea. The good thing is that pretty much every good idea becomes a terrible one in time. But you have to be willing to wait. If the remake of Ghostbusters doesn’t prove this, then nothing will. That bottle of wine you’re holding onto might be marginally better after 50 years, but not after 200. Why not put cocaine back in soda pop while you're at it?
It’s amazing that it took over 4 billion years for us to give the earth its own day in the sun. We celebrate birthdays for nearly everything else - pets, boats, children. But earth, our home, was taken for granted for too long. It’s a nice gesture, but a fairly condescending one. There’s a compelling argument to be made that recycling the earth itself is the only way to say “thanks, buddy, thanks, pal.” It’s such a bad idea that I have an inkling there’s something there. Plus, we’re already doing it, little by little, each and every day.
Don’t save the planet. Recycle it.
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