Okay. It has been almost 5 months now since arriving back in the US of A. In many ways i feel like i have entered back in to the blog into the sameold sameold antville mentality..back into the machine workforce that just keeps on working on to do something to make somethign to buy something to be something. Consume. Consume. Buy. Eat. Be Merry! It is so easy to fall back into that trap. The marketing is so good it is scary or so bad that you can't turn away. Your purpose in life is to buy. eat. be merry! I fell prey to a pair of shoes, then it was the dress, the cardigan, the ad was showing women away in a faraway land...away because they deserve to be away and oh you so deserve to buy that shirt, skirt, those shoes....

 

Sorry off on another crazy speil.

 

Back to Germany. There are a lot of things that are fantastic about Germany and in General Western Europe. I can only speak about Western Europe because that is where I lived one time ago in a land far far away. I understand why Americans romanticize europe. Hey Mr. Tambeourine Man play a song for me. In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you. Hey MR. Tambourine man I made a song for you. I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to....(I like Dylan's words but not so sure I like what happened to his voice...) Anyways Germany made it their priority to take the environment seriously. They treated it like a pragmatic engineering problem and said, hello it just doesn't make sense to waste. Waste not, want not. I love that about Germany, The Netherlands, France, and Belgium. They recycle everything and if the packaging cannot be recycled, then the company who makes it and the stores that sell it have to pay a fee and/or figure out how to dispose of it.

 

Speaking of voices: What happened to the voices of the people who beleived in love and peace and being good to the earth? What happened to the love? the belief that things can change? (Kockamaney hooey treehugging hippie mantra stuff?!) What happened to their kids? What happen to the people in my generation? The people in the "me" generation, did they give up or never care? Why is it they don't seem to change? Why are we voting for the same two parties that make broken promises about our health care, our kid's education, our environment. Hell, why is it we have "No child left behind" but in reality, it seems as though every child, woman, and man who doesn't make enough, are left behind. We are behind America. We are behind. We have not seen the light. We don't realize that we have to change our consuming ways. We have to learn how to save. How to care for one another. We have to learn how to care for our planet, our earth. We need to be shaken into realizing that many of those people we see on the streets holding up signs are recent veterans and still we have our grandfathers on the streets from Vietnam. And still we don't see them. We don't want to see them. Our colored recylced paper gets sent to China on a boat as trash. They take our trash, sort out all the colored paper, and sell it back to us as recycled paper. Meanwhile our own people are losing their jobs. They are losing their homes. Their kids are struggling to make it through the new experimental math problems. Meanwhile we as a nation have fallen so terribly behind all other first world coutries in mathematics, language, and history, that yes, the word on the street in this global market is that the American bully can't cut it anymore and is in some sort of spinned out world going out of control, losing their jobs and their houses. Oh histroy? Do you think we need to know about history? History is why you are who you are. At the end of the day you are who you are because of history: Bad history; Slave history; "Exploration" history, women's history (or herstory if you prefer) and in the end, humankinds's history. You call it one thing and chances are, someone somewhere is going to see the other side to the story. So is it really history? Well, facts are facts and we should start with that. So yes, at the very least, please acknowledge that we all agree at some point We are all going to run out of natural resources and there just won't be any way or reason to make, buy, sell or trade that STUFF anymore. (Yes, I am talking about oil in case you were wondering.)

 

*(anyways forgive me...not sure where this is all coming from...I guess at the end of the day, I am not so impressed with ANY of presidential choices and really, I am looking not just for change but for radical change. Is that so hard to ask?)