The other day I saw a Latino crew painting a building. The guy was spraying paint on the ceiling and his face was in a mist of paint. He was wearing eye gear but no ventilation mask or even dust mask. He was just breathing in all the vaporized paint.
I called out to him, “Yo, dude, wear a mask!”
He said, “I don’t need no stickin’ mask. It don’t bother me. I do this all the time.”
It saddens me to watch this man poison himself and the Earth. It is a disregard for health, a trust in toxic chemicals not to hurt us, and a belief that nothing matters. Toxic chemicals become just a soup we are swimming in. This same sadness overcomes me when I see people spray themselves and their children with mosquito repellent or lather themselves with sunblock. We become a walking poison as these toxic chemicals get into the environment. Frog’s skin is as sensitive as our eyeballs. So, when the oil slick of sunblock pools on top of the water and gets on frogs and fish it feels the same as if we sprayed it in our eyes. If you don’t like mosquitos, eat more garlic and lather yourself in lemon balm because right now, we need mosquitos for the food chain, and we don’t need any more dumbasses.
Do we care? Not if we are a toxo-macho. (This is a new vocab word.) We are walking poison from head to toe over, but whatever. Got to get it done. It will be fine. But now, I’ve noticed an even more extreme Fuck It, mentality. Toxo-macho is killing the planet.
A Ford Bronco blasted past me with a sticker that said So Carbon Tax Me.
Don’t you just love the guy who runs the engine of his jacked-up, double-sized truck in the parking lot while he eats his lunch. Or the mom picking up her kids from school in a SUV who couldn’t turn her engine off and is choking out all the people on the sidewalk waiting for rides.
I feel like getting a sticker that says I killed the Earth for my stupid needs and sticking it on every person or vehicle that unconsciously shortens the life span of the human race and hastens the already speedy extinction we are in. (Just so you know, the rate of species extinctions is tens to hundreds of times faster than the average extinction rate of the last 10 million years.)
Environmentalists are often also humanitarians, so we are just too damn nice. We need to get more edgy and just slap some people up-side the head. Hey! You’re eating out of single use plastic containers! SLAP! Hey you, wearing all that slave labor polyester clothing shipped from overseas – SLAP! Don’t be spraying that deet around me! SLAP!
I bet when people get slapped up-side the head they will think twice about what they are doing. At least if they want to spray themselves down with a faux tan they will hide in their closet to do it.
I’m on the edge of being that crazy person. The counter to toxo-macho is the slap-you-earth-mama. I ain’t waiting around for you to get it. You pull out the aerosol can, and you feel female rath – not later when everything is dead, like now with my hand fucking up your hair.
