parking lots
I watched a chipmunk die today.
It wasn’t hurt by a cat or anything, it was just sick when I found it.
I know it doesn’t seem important, and it shouldn’t bother me, but it does.
It’s not the fact that a living creature lost its life today; I am not so naïve as to think that life does not begin and end hundreds, thousands, of times each day, its not even the fact that I witnessed a creature take its last earthly breath. It’s the fact that it died in a Barnes and Noble parking lot, under one of those little scrubby bushes that civil minded soccer moms plant in parking lot medians during their slot of time between picking little Timmy up from soccer and dropping him off at Tae Kwon Do, because this is the neighborhood that my little angels will grow up in and learn how to be the good little consumer whores and I am trying so hard to raise them right, by gosh, by gum, by gee.
Or maybe it is the fact that my younger sister was embarrassed that I noticed the animal. She is so concerned about what everyone else thinks, that she disregard the fact that something, aside from herself, is suffering (older sister embarrassment is sufferable, so I have been told). It is something so minute, and yet it doesn’t matter because it is an inconvenience…the suffering of other creatures has become a minor annoyance, an inconvenience. Since when does a) some scrubby bush in a parking lot constitute nature and b) our life move so fast that we can’t slow down, take two seconds, look around and see that there is something very very wrong here.
We are ruining our home. We are using resources faster than we are replacing them, we are clogging our air with poison, our water is undrinkable and you can’t find grass unless it is in a closed off, fenced in park. Look around us, what are we doing to ourselves. Think that this small animal’s last breath of air forever was full of car exhaust. It died in the middle of a parking lot, under a malnourished, smog choked bush on a pile of dyed, imitation pine woodchip mulch.
So what my sister says. So what if we destroy our ozone, so what if we pollute all our water, so what if we cut down forests to build malls and then tear down the malls to make parking lots, so what if the whole world ends up as one big parking lot in the name of convenience?!
…I suppose that we can always take solace in the fact that there will always be bored civil minded soccer moms to plant scrubby little bushes in it between soccer and tae kwon do…
just a braindump/ rant...dunno.