Almost Interesting

Fuck Smart Waterâ„¢. This is the most concise way I can sum up what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Ryan, my husband’s younger brother and my father-in-law have been visiting since Friday. For a boy who fancies himself a communist, he sure has some bourgeois fancies: Smart Waterâ„¢ and $60 pants manufactured by Chinese kids to name a couple. He hasn’t even bothered to read the fifty-page The Communist Manifesto, though he was sure to buy it from a major book retailer.

You may be shaking your head right now and thinking something like, “Come off it, Sara. Don’t pick on one self-fellating, hypocritical kid wanting to pretend that lip-service values are enough to save the world.” If you are, you’re partly right; I’m picking on this kid because he’s the most bold-faced illustration of this kind of mindset I’ve seen in a long damned time.

I’m tired of “news” sources encouraging you do the bare-fucking-minimum to salve a bruised conscience: buy the spiral bulbs, buy a hybrid, use paper bags at the supermarket, put your pile of aluminum cans in a special bin. They’ll never tell you the things that’ll really help: stop driving, go vegan, don’t have more than one kid, don’t buy plastic things when another material or none at all will do, don’t live in climates not suited for humans (e.g. the desert or frozen places), don’t buy shit from sweatshops, buy bulk (I’m not talking about Costco, I’m talking about taking containers to the store, filling them up, and paying for the purchased amount.), bring your own bags. They know what you don’t want to hear and they’re not willing to challenge your perceptions in any meaningful way.

True to form, the populace is unwilling to look for ways to improve or, when they’ve accidentally stepped outside their tiny bubble, to make themselves even the slightest bit uncomfortable. They won’t stitch a sock, change an ingredient, hop on a bus, or even something so small as carry their own reusable water bottle because it might inconvenience them in some tiny way and (dear me!) they will simply fucking die if that happens! As Henry David Thoreau puts it in Walden:

Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.

I far more admire the family of four in a one-bedroom apartment than the single or pair living in an enormous house with far too many gaudy baubles in it. These people spend their entire lives working jobs they hate in order to buy shit they don’t need from companies which couldn’t possibly care less about them or the people they employ. Then they end up throwing most of this shit away! We’re fighting wars for oil, half of which is processed into junk which, despite which pretty colored bin you put it in, hardly ever is recycled, and will end up sitting forever in a landfill. Even if the bottles do by some serendipitous chance get recycled, what of all the fuel burned to transport the bottle and its former contents to a store near you? If you live in a developed nation, your tax dollars already pay for the only drink you’re ever going to need: clean water. And guess what? It gets delivered to your home on demand for next to nothing and doesn’t use any goddamned bottles. Nearly a hundred thousand Iraqis are dead for the convenience of driving (in a vehicle you spend a good chunk of your life toiling to finance) to a store to buy a bottle of the same stuff you have for free at home or some other extraneous sugary concoction.

Of course, the only ones who will make any changes once they realize this are usually the ones whom already have done so, hence I am wasting my energy. Hooray for the teenage Communists drinking water out of their blood-stained bottles, wearing jeans created by the tiny hands of those they should be out to protect. Heckuva job, comrade!

The State of Florida executed a convicted child-murderer tonight. The family of the victim attended the execution wearing T-Shirts reading “Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied”. I have mixed feelings about capital punishment – the guilty party would certainly deserve to die, but who has the right to kill another, and to what end? In its root, the death penalty is no more than a simple act of revenge with no deterrent properties.

With these things rattling around in my brain, I came to a conclusion which I wish to make public: Should I meet my end by first degree murder, and my killer/s is/are convicted of the crime, I do not want him/her/them to receive a death sentence as punishment. I don’t want anybody to die in my name, no matter what sort of creature they are. Though, if he/she/they feel remorse for my slaying, I would like him/her/them to seriously consider becoming vegan, which will mean that in the end he/she/they will have caused the deaths of fewer than (and hence have a less-guilty conscience than) your average flesh-eating, non-human-killing neighbor. I don’t want the people whom care for me to lust after his/her/their blood, falsely believing that his/her/their deaths will herald some feeling of justice.

I would also like to make clear that I do not entertain any delusional ideas of myself as someone so important as to be a target for murder, but I have noticed that most people whom meet their end in this manner are not highly notable pre-mortem.