A Can of Tuna
She looks at the can of tuna that she can’t bring herself to eat. “Why?” she asks herself inwardly. It’s incredibly good to eat, this. The omega 3’s alone are a huge component missing from much of the food we all eat. It comes in high levels with this powerful food. It is the same for seaweed used for skin cleansing, tightening and for food and yet our pollution still finds it. It has changed everything.
For so long, we didn’t even know what a terrible thing mercury was or that it causes cancer in humans. Now that we know, we avoid it in thermometers. Thanks to the digital age, it’s not hard. What about the many other things that use mercury like those “greener than green” florescent bulbs? You know the ones, they don’t cast a shadow until they actually brighten. It leaves one to question if you turned it on at all. Where does all that mercury go when we casually toss the bulb in the trash? In the water, that’s where. In the water where the fish are, where the multi-celled organisms live, where the sponges filter, the coral polyps live or did once, where the fish live, where the dolphins, tuna, and other larger fish live and can’t get away. It’s everywhere. We don’t know where to dump it. We only know that it’s in the tuna. It’s in the dolphins. It’s in us.
That is the reason she can’t pick up the tuna can and happily eat. That’s before she even allows the thoughts of the fishing nets to come to mind where the fisherman catch the tuna. If she isn’t careful, the images of ailing or dead dolphins caught in the hoisted nets remain. Wasted, killed life just sitting in the nets as the fisherman scurry about to process the cash crop that feeds them, the tuna. You can find it on the internet. Go check out Youtube. Dolphin safe Tuna.
In this age of telling lies by politicians, news reporters, movie stars, sports celebrities, are we really to believe that corporations with capital gains, waiting in the balance of such labeling, are really going to honor this label in more than just an icon print upon each can? She wishes she could believe it. The doom of it slaps her in the face. To sit and really think in these kinds of terms can drive a person stark mad. Where is the hope? Where is the trust? It’s gone. It’s overshadowed by the large dark cloud of deceit that we have allowed to live in our culture. How can we possibly cut it out? How can one science type whacked out geeky girl make a difference? Shout out that we are going to hell in a hand basket? Spend time on the rapture and tell folks to repent? They wouldn’t do it anyway.
She isn’t even doing her part. Her own recycling habits would shock the best of the environmentalists and yet she really does care. It doesn’t help when you consider the energy it takes to breakdown, sort and send all of this material back for re-purpose for re-manufacturing into another version of itself or something brand new. Use less. Eat less? Maybe there is something to each of those.
Scaring people into doing anything only works for the short term. We need a long term solution. One that we all can be proud of to support and get behind. We know we should be stewards of this earth and yet there are spoiled little rich countries (pointing the finger at my own chest) that are not doing our part. We talk about it. We walk about with our cute little signs that take energy to make. We go to the gym and don’t even consider harnessing our own energy. We don’t power the lights, the tvs that are turned on, the ipods, cellphones and tablets we use to amuse ourselves or multi-task with. What would happen if each of us picked one thing and went with it and left all the “multi” half done tasks to be done by themselves? Would that help our world? Maybe it’s worth an experiment or two.
She, for one, can’t do that though. Her mission statement clearly tells her that she has to balance a lot of things. She can’t just focus on one thing. She’d fall over and die on the spot. It’d happen. She has already come close. Suicide is an epidemic. How many times do you think it is due to the dolphin safe tuna can on the counter? God, we hope none.
And what of those that publish the newsletter that she read on lunch hour by a gung-ho colleague bent on raising money for an environmentalists’ movement? She read the articles. She was appalled by the pictures and the facts listed in each article. That is until she began to detect that all the facts within where not exactly portrayed with the utmost in truth. She caught onto the lies there too. What a let down. The fear mongering and cajoling type written articles were enough to make her sick. Why can’t we just speak the truth about these things, admit our faults and work toward fixing the problem instead of being bent on the finger pointing and blame that is tossed like a big red ball about the room from side to side?
It looks like one tree is not the focus. The old idiom still rings true. We can’t just look at one tree, we have to look at the whole forest. We even have to look at both forest and tree. No wonder bifocals were a huge invention. The contact lens version still needs work though. Her heart goes out for those training one eye to see far and one eye to see close. Who thought that would be a good idea? Are we trainable enough? Yes. Maybe there is hope then, with a long sigh, she concludes.
It’s going to take time. It’ll be a slow transformation. Indeed, fast is slow and slow is fast in this endeavor. That’s how nature does it, slowly. Everything done and not done counts. With another dramatic sigh, she picks up the pen and continues writing up the data collected as she settles on the next item that she might have for lunch, not tuna.
~Regina Holt June 12, 2012
