Thanksgiving is a time to be with family and loved ones, so it must be extremely difficult for touring bands when their families are on the other side of the country. Check out Blaise from Ionia’s tour diary to see where his head was at a few days before Turkey Day!
Coffee cups, plastic water bottles, taco wrappers, veggie burger containers, glass tea bottles, cd shrink wrap… the list goes on and on and on. We live in a throw away nation – everything we buy is put into something else and after the product is used the container becomes obsolete. We are born and bred into the idea that there is some never ending abundance of thermoplastics and thermosetting polymers such as plastic, cardboard, paper, and glass. It takes fossil fuels to make the most of these things and it takes even more to move them around the world. We use them for a brief couple of seconds and then discard them like they were.. well, garbage. That’s the word we use to describe it.
Garbage is defined as “discarded or useless material.” When we are home we can all ignore how much we waste. But on the road, you become more intimately involved with just how much each one of us makes. This haunts me on a day to day basis. On the road and during every gig we play, I open another four bottles of water. I try to reuse as much as i can but old habits die hard. As we travel from town to town on the highways carved through the appalachian mountains, I witness guard rails on the sides of cliffs overflowing with old blown out tires, pieces of a mattress, beer cans, and plastic. It cascades down the side of the mountain. And I think to myself, “Those things will be there long after I’m gone.”
We live in a throw away nation. The Industrial Revolution brought us so many good things – garbage is not one of them. We eat when we’re not hungry. We drink when we’re not thirsty. We buy what we don’t need and throw away everything that’s useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn’t need. Pretend he’s got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn.
I hope we come to a time where we change our infrastructure completely. I hope for all of our sake that time is soon. It’s a small world with so much beauty. I would hope that we can create more and throw away less. Until then we are just children of the THROW AWAY NATION.
Add comment