Sentient Collective

This article became relevant to me today after I spent the morning unpackaging stuff that was delivered to our door (which we ordered, of course): clothes, toys and small furniture stuff, such as a booster chair, for our grandson, and stuff that we bought at the store for our dogs. I was snipping away at those small plastic thingies that hold the purchased thing to cardboard backing, or to which were attached warning labels and such, and I was smashing plastic bags to put in the trash (non recyclable here in our Chicago burbs), and cutting up the cardboard boxes into pieces that would fit in the recyclable bin. So wasteful of resources and my time, and kind of disturbing to think of those tiny little bits of plastic that will go into a landfill someplace.

Plastic production has increased dramatically in the last 50 years. Photo credit: Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Excerpt:

Every year “at least 8 million tons of plastics leak into the ocean—which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute,” the report finds. “If no action is taken, this is expected to increase to two per minute by 2030 and four per minute by 2050.

“In a business-as-usual scenario, the ocean is expected to contain one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight).”

Plastic production has increased 20-fold since 1964, reaching 311 million tons in 2014, the report says. It is expected to double again in the next 20 years and almost quadruple by 2050. New plastics will consume 20 percent of all oil production within 35 years, up from an estimated 5 percent today.

I work in an ER and we see suicides all the time. And we get at least 3 suicidal ideations a night. We all care about you. I promise, we do. A team of complete strangers who have worked 3+ 12 hour shifts this week who are being screamed at all day and night and probably haven’t had lunch and trust me, we still love you and care about you.

We had a 16 year old patient last night who we couldn’t save. We were in that room with this patient for over an hour, we did everything we could. And let me tell you, we all cried. The EMT’s, the nurses, the doctor. We all huddled together in the doctors dictation room and cried.

I went through the rest of my shift with smudged mascara and tracks on my cheeks.

I remember the names of all the patients that have taken their lives on my shifts.

I remember squeezing the hands, smoothing the hair, kissing the foreheads, and wiping away the blood and the vomit of every patient that has left me too soon.

I can still see every face that I have zipped into a body bag.

Trust me, someone cares about you. You have never met them yet. You don’t ever think about them. They are never remembered when you talk about heroes and role models.

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