How it Began

A page from my journal
(with additional web editorial)
Rensselaer Train Station, NY
August 1, 2007, 9:15 A.M.

I’ve been reading my favorite book, Adventure Divas by Holly Morris, while waiting for the train but I’m too excited to get through a single sentence. I’m eager to visit my family, but I’m even more excited by the prospect of going to Africa next summer. Last night, my husband Tim offered to cover the cost of my travels as a graduation present. Today I can think of nothing else.

The latest impetus for my desire presented itself a week ago at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Tim and I won a bid on concert tickets to benefit the AnimaLovers Silent Auction. The package included VIP parking, access to the bar and a full spread of hors’ devours at the Hall of Springs. Rarely treating ourselves to such luxury, when the day came to use the tickets I was really trying to enjoy the pre-concert festivities. Instead, I found myself disgusted with the shear amount of waste.

Caked with food, hundreds of plastic spoons, knives, forks and plates were carelessly tossed into the trash with recyclable bottles. Recycling bins were nowhere in sight. I watched “Very Important People” throw plates away only to re-enter the food line and grab new ones. As I watched one woman finish half of her soda and throw the rest away, I could think only of the poor in Columbia and India waiting to drink rain from their gutters thanks to mega-corporations. It was painfully obvious that most were unconcerned with their environmental and social impact on the world through simple, everyday practices.

Many important issues specifically surround Coca-cola, the corporation contracted for this venue, and are somehow not general knowledge:

• The beverage was probably produced in a third world country like India where water is stolen from an already depleted water table while pollution destroys what remains.
• Coca-Cola, traditionally anti-union, allegedly hired right-wing death squads to terrorize and murder workers at its Colombian bottling plant.
• 3 liters of waste water are required for each liter of Coke produced, used for machine maintenance and plant clean-up. (See death squad article.) 
• By Coke’s own admissions, their Dasani bottled water is nothing more than tap water sold as “pure” water, in which they add twice the limit for bromite, a cancer causing agent, to improve the taste index.

Issues that surround not just Coke, but every beverage provider:

• Two cups of oil are already burned, pre-consumption, making and transporting the plastic bottle.
• Diet drinks, in particular, contain the drug Aspartame, a toxin rejected for 16 years by the FDA — until Rumsfeld pulled political strings. (Rumsfeld was the CEO of Searle, the company that produced Aspartame, using his political power to injur American health in the name of profit.)

I took a hard look at the crowd, unbothered, unenlightened, simply waiting to be entertained. Sheep. Armed with the knowledge of consumerism, I was no better. Simply being there meant I was complicit in these atrocities of gross excess.

Before the music began, I turned to Tim and said, “I want to go to Africa.”

“Right now?” he asked.

I answered, “Yeah. I need to dig a well.”