Dreams Down the Drain

Dear “Leaders”,

Who am I to talk to when no one will listen to anything that they don’t agree with? Which leaders am I supposed to reach out too when they are all bought out, whipped into shape by the companies that own the world? The people in the know are too complacent with the lives they live and are fearful of change. Society functions effortlessly when we consider the environment has forever. I wish I had forever.

If I had forever I would have had a chance. Does everyone have the same desire to change the world? I grew up assuming everyone wanted to grow up to become someone who made a difference. That was until I myself grew up to learn no one had the time to change the world. We are so pressured in life to keep working until we are on the brink of a total health collapse that we don’t have the time to stop and pick up trash in the street. We go around assuming someone else who has the time will. Before I had any clue the true restraint time implicates, I myself used to pick up trash in the neighborhoods nearby upset that no one else had made the effort to take pride in their own community.

I knew I was interested in the idea of making a change but I was still young. In school me and a good friend decided to work on our science fair project together. Wired to the gills on caffeine, we decided it would be interesting and dare I say, logical, to feed a houseplant a single can of Monster Energy Drink in the hopes of observing accelerated growth. To some degree, I believe we both understood our project was a waste of a good plant, a good drink and good time. Yet we were still interested in the science of why it wouldn’t work. We thought that science wasn’t always just to prove something exists but that it was just as important to understand why certain things don’t work. True knowledge isn’t just a game of memory and knowing things, it's a matter of how you compare and contrast the things we know about life in order to understand the rest of life. Everything is connected, except for us. For humans.

After many more years of a dreadful school curriculum of no environmental importance, which was all I was concerned with, I decided to go to community college. Maybe I could find more sources of education on our climate and environment in college. Upon being accepted into a community college I questioned the course counselors on my best route to end up well equipped to enter a field into plant science. Most of my friends had enrolled into a general science degree in order to take to another school. My counselor however, instructed me to go into Environmental Science. To my ignorance again, I thought the science of the environment would be the science of the world that made us. Instead it was a course to educate the matters of building protocol in not the world that made us but the world we built. Educators in the program persuaded me to stay and engage in the courses by offering me a simple research job in an Environmental Firm. The guys and girls that worked there were terrific and all enthusiastic about their passions in that field. I quickly became exhausted by the work that was anything but plant science, on top of being drowned in coursework that would lead me into a job just the same. Like many others before me, I was a quitter.

I gave it up. I quit my dreams. I used to daydream for hours on end of a lab all my own that I could crossbreed and genetically change plants to adapt to a world that we refuse to stop attacking. I knew that I would have to find myself with an intellect, or a drive high enough to reach an institution that could lead me down those paths. Unfortunately, my small stake in college had already racked up some debts that I had to work more hours to pay off. Hours that wouldn’t give me the mental capacity to handle college courses on top of it. Above it all, I came to the conclusion shortly after deciding to give up on college that I would never have made an impact on the world anyway. How likely is it for any of us to make a difference?

The hustle it would take to reach a position where I could make a difference would require time that I don’t have. I don’t have time for much anymore. Much of my time goes towards keeping a roof over my head. As well as spending some of my time watching the world around us pile up with trash. It’s filling our oceans, our backyards and our air. By the time I could ever have enough money to get myself to that position, trying to make change, it will have already been too late. How can I have the drive to make changes to our world, when there's already so much more friction in keeping the world sinking in the same old way? How am I supposed to be excited to lose sleep working towards losing sleep obtaining degrees to make a change when we will run out of paper to print the degree on by that time? This is an exaggeration, but it doesn’t matter what I say. It will never reach anyone with the power to make changes. And I will never have that power myself.

The hope for humanity seems to have been eclipsed by the size and power of our wallets. I won’t have time to make a change, even at the age of twenty-one. I am merely writing this so those who have made the decisions for the world for me can see my hopelessness. I hope for it to keep them up at night, haunting them with visions of the world they are leaving behind for us.

Sincerely, the heirs to the garbage you leave behind