Doing Your Part

I try to take responsibility in all that I do. I try to be as ecologically friendly as possible. I want to reduce my impact upon the environment. I walk or ride my bike instead of drive whenever possible. I RECYCLE; I am still surprised that some people haven’t caught on to this trend. I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. I buy Fair Trade products. I eat as much like a localivore as possible, no discount food outlets. I’m vegan. I hate that it takes 6 pounds of grain for 1 pound of meat, the torments animals go through being raised, the slaughtering process, the materials used for packaging, and transporting meat to grocery outlets is all such a HUGE waste when the entire process could take a detour when we just eat the original 6 pounds. However, I know that for how hard I try to reduce my carbon footprint, there are a ton of jackasses with their Ford F-450s, meat and potatoes eating, Wal-Mart shoppers who couldn’t care less about how they are aiding in the destruction of the world. I know I sound like a typical health nut, save the environment, peace loving crazy vegan hippie whose secretly judging everyone else who’s not like them well, ---I am, a little. I understand that it is difficult to be enviro-friendly, however it’s not an impossible feat only for the strong of heart.

Anyone, even the people I called jackasses before can reduce their impact on the world. I don’t have the unrealistic expectation for everyone to take the save the world mentality to the extreme, but there are certain, small things to do for your part.

1. Stop buying so much unnecessary stuff.
2. Shop at local farmer’s markets. They’re cheaper than grocery stores, fresher, and you get out to know your community.
3. Don’t shop at Wal-Mart. Don’t support globalization.
4. Check out Annie Leonard’s short film, The Story of Stuff. It will change what you think about consumerism in our society.

5. Reduce meat consumption. Buy meat from local butchers. The animals tend to come from local farms and chances are had a better life.
6. Walk or ride your bike, its good exercise and fun activity for the family instead of sitting in front of the TV.
7. Compost projects. It’s a good way to reduce waste and provide fertilizer for gardens.
8. Don’t be stupid. RECYCLE.

Aside from saving the environment to improve the world, people can work towards internal change, which can be more difficult than the suggestions I have provided above. Amid narratives of hope and despair, to be fervently responsible is a challenge. It’s difficult to see the path of own lives.

An objective perspective is needed to fully accurately judge. Becoming removed to look inward reveals a true identity. Soul-searching. There is a task given by potential Hospice volunteers to give them perspective of the dying people they will be working with, its writing their own obituary. Think about how you would write your life, as brutally honest as possible. Would you be happy with all that you wrote? The experience is sobering and mindful. This is a way to evaluate your life. See what you life or don’t and where its headed. There is the possibility, if you’re open to it, for change. It’s not an easy task, difficult, and potentially ugly at times, but the result of being who you always wanted to be.

I know that it’s a broad generalization to say that with consensus everyone wants or desires anything, but I will anyways. Everyone (possibly with a few exceptions) wants to be educated, helpful (their communities, less fortunate people, the world, etc), informed, travel, and being apart of something outside of themselves.

Bharati Mukherjee, through her book Jasmine, has started. In Jasmine, Mukherjee gives a voice to the voiceless, an Indian girl named Jasmine. Jasmine journeys to illegally to America to commit suicide on her husband’s funeral pyre. However, upon entering the country she is raped by her transporter, a man named Half-Face. In being raped she developed an epiphany of sorts, “For the first time in my life I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human. Half-Face was from an underworld of evil. It was a very simple, very clear perception, a moment of truth; the kind of understanding that I have heard only comes with a moment of death. I had faced death twice before, and cheated it.” (p.116) In this moment Jasmine has a terrifying awareness about the evil the world holds and how it can defile you. The type of evil that destroys whatever it takes over. She came to America to die and them gets raped, which for a lot of people would be all the more inclined towards suicide. However, she has the strength to look into herself and overcome, adapt to the circumstance, and grow. She looks to her past, knowingly faced death before and lived, and realizes that she wants to continue. Jasmine reinvents herself, taking the God Shiva of destruction incarnate and kills Half-Face. She creates a new identity from this experience and moves forwards in her life.

Salman Rushdie wrote a story called, “The Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” in which he is mocking the obsessions people. In the story, everyone wants to try to purchase the Ruby Slippers from the Wizard of Oz. The setting is in an auction house that would be comparable to a face-to-face version of eBay. The narrator of the story essentially has an unlimited supply of money at his disposal in order to buy the slippers for his ex-girlfriend/cousin. In the midst of the auction, the narrator “becomes detached from the earth,”(page 102). As he floats above himself, he sees the triviality of his desires and the world, thus enacting a change within himself.

Rushdie writes, “In fiction’s grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away our desires, and see them anew, from distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go. Like men dying in blizzards, we lie down in the snow to rest,”(page 102). Rushdie relate his narrators experience to the audience, the people of the world. With hope of that people will step away from themselves and evaluate their lives to find the true value and meaning in life.

Only by floating away in the distance can we gain perspective to change. When you know about yourself, everything, despite pain, despite not being as we hope, with the valuable knowledge we can change.

PLEASE RECYCLE