Thursday, February 21, 2013

How do you ignore this stuff?

I wish I could sit cluelessly at a celebration and just enjoy the party, but instead my mind races with questions like, why are we such a wasteful group of people.

My school had a flag day celebration today and it was an all school assembly, so kids from Kinder all the way to Seniors attended the event. It started with our school choir and band, awesome, nice, and then our advanced drama kids performed a skit appropriate to the culture here, but in Spanish, so I'm not sure what was going on. Ok, cool, this is nice. Then a hired local band started playing. Ok, they are ok, but we have a band here and how much did that cost? The next thing you know there are people in costumes running around, the diablos of carnival - I think. From stage left the two mascots of the rival baseball teams enter, the lion and tiger. Their cartoony costumes and silly dances were funny. The elementary kids were coming unglued from excitement, meanwhile the high school kids found a few moments to look up from their cell phones. Why we have whole school assemblies has escaped my understanding the entire time I've worked here. Ok, so other than the wasted money on this band things seem ok, and then I look up.

We are in the gym, so the ceilings are really tall, and I see, suspended from the rafters, huge bags filled with hundreds of balloons. Seriously? Our rich, privileged  educated citizens chose balloons for this celebration? Rubber pieces of evilness? At this point the songs and beats have completely stopped for me and all I can do is think of all those balloon pieces floating around the streets until they eventually end up in our corals surrounding the island. Those same corals that our Sea Savers have been trying to protect and here we are in one swoop of idiocracy, letting hundreds of balloons fall onto the entire student population. The message? Well, when we are celebrating we don't care about the environment? My mind is consumed and I am saddened that I can no longer enjoy the party when a blast from the stage emits thousands of small pieces of paper. It's a confetti cannon. What? The party was already rockin', the kids laughing, enjoying the moment, what did these small pieces of trash add to this event? What do balloons add to your event? Is there a solution? Can we celebrate our accomplishments and not be wasteful? Remember the DR hasn't solved their trash problem. They don't have lined landfills and appropriate trash collections. The trash from your house is usually spread throughout the streets shortly after piling it on the curb. The next step.... ocean.

Was your 30 seconds of fun worth this?


2 comments:

sara said...

That would never happen here...it's against the law to release balloons in SF. Hope that make you feel a little better.

Lisa Y said...

Sara! That does make me feel better! I'm on the hunt for an eco-conscience community to call home! It's good to know that there are places out there that realize it's ok to celebrate and care for the environment!