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Friday, June 15, 2012

Being a Citizen

The world seems so strange right now, with every person's priorities being different from the next person's. Somehow things kind of keep functioning; I just don't understand how, and if it's actually true to say that we are functioning.

Today I threw a plastic take-away cup in the garbage because I was on "too much of a time crunch to be able to rinse it out and throw it into a recycle bin." That was my excuse anyhow. The truth, I see now, is that I could have taken the time to put it into the recycling bin, but at that moment, my priorities were skewed. I was focused on getting the things done in my life that were apparently of more importance in that moment than maintaining the future health of our planet.

Some people may scoff and say, "it's only one plastic cup. Don't worry about it." Unfortunately, I read the book called What if Everybody Did That?... If you decide to read this book to a child, you will understand my dilemma.

What if Everybody Did That?- By:  Ellen Javernicke
What if Everybody Did That?- By:  Ellen Javernicke
Had I planned it out better, I could have easily felt like I had enough time to eat my breakfast AND recycle my cup, but I didn't plan well due to various other excuses I can provide myself with.

I don't think it's possible to be a perfect citizen, and sometimes trying our best to be perfect at anything is too stressful to manage. Although, societal laws call for perfection and if perfection is not attained then there are real consequences.

To which level of perfection must one perform in order to live as a proper citizen in the world? Must one just barely abide by the rules of society in order to get through life? Would that be considered being a proper citizen?

There is an elderly lady near where we live. She goes out to the recycling bin in the parking lot, and she literally takes the non-flattened boxes out of the bin and she flattens them and then returns them to the bin. She is someone who sees most of the younger generation as 'careless.'

I can sorta see her point, I suppose ;) Although, often I think that the younger generation cares too much but that they have a hard time focusing on any one of those things due to what we talked about in the first paragraph of this post.







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