Incipient Vagabond--Verily

I wrote this my senior year of high school, and came across it as I was cleaning my computer. Give it a chance... Might just use it for getting into thick skulls back home in the middies.
Go green. Think globally, act locally. “10 Simple things to do to be green!” We hear these ads like a fad. Buzz words, they are. But it’s gonna take more than some alliteration and catchy phrases to constitute real change. It takes a cultural change, a movement of the masses, so to speak. What does that include? Not abstract, fuzzy generalizations. It takes cold, hard, on the ground (in the ground, in the case of gardening) action. Legislative reform, and individual responsibility. For example, if you see litter out by your yard, do you just leave it? If you spill a cup of coffee, do you just watch it run and say “oh well, it was bound to happen”? Noo! You whip it up, pick it up, put up a fence, set a coaster and a lid and take recovery action followed by preventative action. Make sure it can’t keep happening. This is what we have to do.

I see this sequence of cause-and-effects that has built up to our culture of laziness and unquenchable thirst to be entertained and do as little work as possible. We were happy people, people in Europe are happy people, in local townships and villages and compact living, as far as I’ve heard. But when we moved out to the vast Western frontier, we found seemingly unending space. Huge tracts of land that had never been laid claim to were snapped up. We still have miles between towns in the Midwest, more empty space than we know what to do with. Urban sprawl was born with the car; we can build new homes on the edge of town where land is cheap and it is much quieter, then a new grocery store and fast food restaurants and a gas station pop up to serve us, and boom! You have suburban living, a microcosm appendage of the greater body. We don’t have to interact with people we don’t want to. We have several feet of aluminum and steel, and glass, and pavement between us. Flip ‘em off, what are they gonna do? Then began the internet boom. We could go online and focus purely on what we wanted, ignore the critics and write THEM off as the fools. Anonymity let us be as cruel as we wanted to complete strangers. But suddenly we feel empty, and we can’t understand why. Do you feel as isolated as I? Well, I did, I felt isolated, bored, apathetic and unaware. Ennui has creeped in, America--we are blissfully unaware, in this state, of global issues that are driven by our lifestyles.

Water crises, for example, because we pay for transporting water from municipal sources hundreds of miles away from ourselves because somehow it is no longer of this earth if it is in a clear bottle with a pretty label carried by a truck…. A magical transformation takes place--yeah, the plastic leaches mildly toxic chemicals into your water, so I guess it is a little more artificial (read: delicious) to the human palate.