Home One for all - all for One

After winter slowly has faded away and the message of flowering is brought forward by summer, a lot of things will creep up from its nests. Animals that have slept during the cold season now open up their eyes and step out from their homes, to take part of a new season - a new life. However, summer is not only sunshine and pleasant flowers. While friendly animals awake from their slumber, a flock of egoistic fools are trespassing natural environment - their goal: to destroy everything you love.

I often take long walks in nature, to get away from the meaningless everyday life of broken over-socialization revolving around consumer products and modern lifestyles, and to establish a spiritual relationship to nature and the gods who overlook every action that I make, every breath that I take. Hours can pass and it will not matter, as time at this moment will stand still. I will ease my eyes on the birds flying down and settling on the waves of a lake, like a caravan of airplanes ready for landing. I will watch the leaves fall down from the trees and dance in an intense motion, before the wind sweeps them by. I will notice bugs and frogs, rabbits and roe deers. Just like these animals, the last thing on my mind is human confrontation. Humans live in crowded cities, but beautiful animals are found only in nature.

While watching these deers run past me, I often wonder: "Why are you afraid? What are you running away from?” Keeping these thoughts inside my head, I walk home and stop past a field where children in the summer like to barbeque hot dogs and play football. My eyes look down on a rubbish heap of half-empty beer cans, ripped opened bags of potatoe chips half-eaten and some clothes and backpacks. At first I stand completely still, processing the smells of old Carlsberg, grass and earth. Then, I decide to walk home and bring my working gloves and a plastic bag with me. It's time to clean up.

Of course, I know that this pile of garbage is a direct result of lost teenagers trying to find a way to enjoy their otherwise pitiful and meaningful lives. I know the only actual interest they have, is to get drunk, eat junk food and to talk about easy-going things like sex, cars and pop music. But even though that realization to me is an obvious fact, I still cannot believe what they have done. I still cannot accept how they live and how they choose to destroy all that beauty which I spend my free time fighting for. I still feel hatred inside for what they are doing.

I return to this place, and begin to collect these heaps of consumed "fun". It is a lifestyle I pick up, because today most people are living their life like this. In schools, students throw pencils, rubbers and candy on the floor, as "the cleaner will pick it up anyway". On the market square, liberal youngsters decide to get something to drink, so they buy a Coke and then throw it somewhere where they see fit. Throwing the garbage in a dumpster, where it's supposed to go, is too much work - and besides - it's not "cool" to do what's right. The more our society becomes individualistic, the more the broad mass will try to use conformity as a means of acting out non-conformity. It is therefore "cool" to have sex before you're 15, but since everybody are supposed do it; it's still a form of conformity.

While I bend down to face the disgusting smell of old beer under a lingering wave of heat from the burning sun above me, I come to think of what people usually say when you pick garbage up from other people: "But that's the municipal workers job, not ours". This reflection is a very important one, because it describes the inherent problem behind why people still see it as socially acceptable to behave like a dog: we make a mess, others clean it up. The mentality of the modern individual is that of a passive one, because it refuses to take an active part of physical reality, of life. People see it as OK to destroy nature, because society has hired low-paid workers to clean up after them.

What doesn't make sense in this logical conclusion is that it defies the improvement of higher moral character, and more important, it denies respect and love for nature. People who intentionally throw their garbage in the open green, are the same people who are attached to an illusionary reality of God-given technology, a system that the more it develops, the more uncontrollable and powerful it becomes. People can't relate to, understand or respect nature, because their lives are totally isolated from reality. Instead, they spend their lives either in front of the TV-screen, or behind the desk where the teacher or boss will indoctrinate them and assign them to tasks that ultimately make no lasting change outside of their desires for wealth, "equality" and fear of death.

As I accidentally spill beer on my arms, I frown, as I come to think of why this system hasn't fallen apart yet. If someone is making a mess out of an otherwise clean area, it is always some poor idealistic moron like myself, who will have to do the cleaning. It is never a cause of altruism or personal recognition, because few people care. Most will stare, and then continue to walk by as if nothing ever happened. However, if you are lucky, an unsuspecting individual will pass by, stop and look at what you are doing, and refuse to stand by and just watch. Therein lies the hope for a green activist: to inspire others to care for and respect the little of a beautiful summer day that we have left.

One may wonder, why I at that point did not let a paid worker do the job instead. The answer to that is simple: because I am not a dog. If I need to defecate, I go to the toilet - not to my room and do my needs there. If I feel an urgent need to vomit, which I many times feel like doing when living in this society, I will try to do so in a bag and not in my bed. The same goes for garbage: I throw it where it belongs and not in the open wild. If everybody would think this way, there would be no beer-incidents in an otherwise healthy and beautiful area. It would not ultimately save nature from becoming a victim of the modern industrial society, but it would at least reduce the amount of waste found in creeks, lakes and at beaches. People would only need to spend perhaps a few hours a week, picking up the garbage found near their own area. And the more people would acknowledge the importance of having a clean green space for our children to play in, the less would individuals act moronic and instead follow the example set out by others.

With this in mind, I swing the bag over my shoulder, try to overcome the now almost unbearable smell of chips and beer, and decide to walk home. However, before I leave the place, I spot a person staring at me from a fairly large distance away. I look back, grin, and continue my way home. I smile, because inside I feel a hope burning: that maybe this person has seen what I have done, and consider to do the same. Perhaps he or she thinks it was me who have messed the area up, and that I have returned due to bad feelings and guilt. I could not care less: my aim is not to become Jesus, but to protect and save that which I had enjoyed this very same summer day.

Then, just before I have reached home, I come to think of the roe deer that just about an hour ago ran away from me at first eye sight - I now know why it was afraid of me; humanity today is a collective of self-destructive, egoistic and nature-fearing fools. If I was a deer and met a human being in the forest, I'd probably do what's best, and flee too. Run away, until better times for my children and me could come. In the meanwhile, the parasitic individualists will depend on the few green activists, who through a perhaps naive idealism still believe in the power of the sun, the freshness of clean water and the beauty of a summer day that never seems to fade away...

May 6, 2006

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