A Very Special Birthday For Earth
Image via Wikipedia
I am standing at the baggage claim at Los Angeles International Airport, watching people from all around this Earth collecting their suitcases and boxed consumer items purchased abroad. An eight-year-old Hindu boy in a Lakers jersey wrestles a Chinese-made computer off the carousel.
“The joke’s on you,” I mutter. “There are no lakes in Los Angeles, not one.”
It is time for us to make a change.
This is the first Earth Day I’ve really celebrated, but it is a celebration not of joy but of tears.
We all share this warm, level, heavily peopled planet, although of course we do not actually share it.
I wondered, as the Pakistani cab driver took me to my hotel in Santa Monica, if the world’s poorer citizens were ready to follow our lead.
They have no other choice.
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Thank you for this sober reflection on the state of our nation’s lakes, Mr. Layne. While my religion prevents me from approving of all the curses you insist on using, travelogues such as this fill me with hope that the son I plan to adopt from Pakistan will one day be able to drive you to your hotel, too.
Similarly Utah has very little to do with the history of jazz.
I hate Mother Earth. I mean, my own mother was so suffocating, I turned out gay. Thanks a bunch Mom, now I have to go through life with people’s dicks in my mouth.
I’m just worried that the human race will stop reproducing altogether if this whining EarthMom doesn’t shut the fuck up already, and let people watch sports on the teevee, if that is what they want to do. It’s too late for me, because now I hate all sports except for gay ones like golf.