Happy Earth Day, everyone!  Go out there and pick up some garbage, maybe plant a tree, and/or perhaps cut down on the amount of electricity you use.

Today, when picking up our eldest from school and walking home, HRH Princess Katherine suggested that we pick up all the garbage we see on our walk home.  Provisionally, Her Majesty and I agreed (no kleenex or other *really* gross things, we said).

Now I want to address the cynics out there, who say that having an Earth Day is stupid because we go right back to our shameful ways the other 364 days of the year, or that our picking up garbage (hey, a plastic grocery bag full of garbage is quite good for a 5 minute walk) is irrelevant because it’s just one tiny path in our whole city, which in itself is just a nothing little town on the grand scheme of things.

And I say, that’s thinking about it all wrong.  Every day we raise our awareness of our planet (and more specifically, how shitty we treat it) is one more day than if we had nothing at all.  Every plastic grocery bag full of garbage we pick up is one bag full of garbage that isn’t still lying on the ground.  Every tree you plant, every light bulb you switch off because sunlight was available, every walk or bike ride you take instead of taking the car, it all adds up.  It especially adds up if everyone pitches in.

So what if no one single thing that I and only I do can completely solve the entire pollution problem on this planet?  That’s absurdist.  And yet that’s the very reasoning that cynics will use when mocking Earth Day or scoffing at people who pick up a bag full of garbage on their walk home.  You can’t look at percentages of the whole and ridicule how small an effort it is.  However much effort is put into cleaning up our planet is more than nothing.

So do something good for your planet today.  Continue to do that tomorrow, and so on.  And to the cynics out there?  Fuck you in your stupid asses with the garbage the rest of us picked up today.

Was today Earth day? Damn ... I guess I’ll celebrate it next year.