What Were We Thinking?

With the season upon us, we put up decorations of the tackiest kind to show our fellow creatures what we can manufacture to entertain ourselves. We show our personalities in the worst ways.

There is another activity we perform that also shows our lack of concern for our planet. At birthdays, weddings, and even a memoriam, bunches of color hydrogen filled balloons are gathered then released into the sky. They look so pretty floating away.

Yet do we ever think what happens to them when they are out of sight? They don’t just drift off into space and disappear. Instead they get to a certain height and pop. Even as light as a balloon is, gravity takes over and the plastic wrapper and string fall back to the ground. They could wind up in a tree or on the street or in a lake or ocean.

Like every other piece of plastic trash we discard, it can become entangled in some critter scratching for a meal or suffocate and drown in the water. We don’t worry about our trash because it is hauled away to a place we cannot see or smell.

I have added to the pile as much as anybody else but today I am more careful at what I recycle and what I throw away. I have also limited my purchases to organic or natural items and have made fewer purchases. It’s just trying to do my part.

Some people worry that some unknown space creatures will invade this planet we call Earth. I’m not worried about that. During my lifetime our species as contaminated our space with technology so we can tweet each other. From looking at images of what surrounds us, I feel that if anything else came within sight of this blue marble spinning in space, it would be avoided just like any other dump.