What Goes Around…

Here’s what it was like growing up in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s – and keep in mind, I grew up in a penthouse with a fabulous view of downtown Manhattan, the Hudson River, and the Statue of Liberty:

• Under cover of night, all the buildings would incinerate trash, sending enormous clouds of black smoke billowing into the air.  Consequently, there was always a layer of soot on anything that didn’t keep moving.  Very Dickensian.
• Despite the fact that it rained constantly, and our roof leaked nonstop, there was always a water shortage.  If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down was the unforgettable mantra one fine summer.
• Our pipes were so rusty (it was an old building), the water often looked like blood gushing out of the faucet.  The hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had nothing on our apartment.  We had no choice but to let the tap run for several minutes – like ten - before the water was remotely drinkable.  Evian and Perrier hadn’t hit Chelsea yet.
• Drivers on the Long Island Expressway tossed all forms of trash from their speeding cars – until one iconic American Indian (of Italian descent) shed a public service tear to Keep America Beautiful.
• Whenever I visited friends in tony Gramercy Park, I always left with two feces-covered feet.  My pet name for Gramercy Park was “Dog Sh*t Square.”
• The weather was always crazy, constantly blowing, changing, shifting.  Every winter, there would be a few days when the temperature would suddenly skyrocket – from below freezing to a sweltering 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Everyone kept their heavy winter coats on, unbuttoned, because they knew that in just a day or two, the temperature would plummet again.  Nobody got hysterical thinking it was the end of the world.
• People in New York sweat so much, no matter what season it is, I often wondered why scientists couldn’t come up with a way to harness all that perspiration, thereby averting the next water crisis.  Seriously.  It’s a tough town.

Still, change was in the air – even then.  After all, this was the era of Roots, I’m OK, You’re OK, Looking Out for Number One, and Sybil.  In 1970, Newsweek warned a new ice age was coming, triggered by cloud cover from all our sinful pollutants – and Earth Day debuted to help us absolve ourselves.  In 1972, Time hailed Adele Davis “the high priestess of a new nutrition religion” for creating a revolutionary natural foods craze.  (Two years later, she died of bone cancer.)

Judging from the books on my parents bedside table, apocalypse, overpopulation, and famine were always just around the corner.

By 1989, recycling was mandatory.  But a lot of New Yorkers didn’t trust it – especially after the Long Island trash barge scandal of ‘87.  Since incineration was by now “out,” and landfill was causing groundwater contamination, someone came up with the bright idea of sending tons of local waste on a little cruise – down South, to be exact, where it would quietly be dumped on vacant farm land.  But when two little old ladies who lived near the debarckation point raised holy hell, the stinking barge was turned away, refused entry by Cuba and Mexico - a stinking, nomadic SS St. Louis of garbage.

It finally ended up in Brooklyn, where its ripe cargo was - surprise - burned.

My devotion to recycling was spotty at best.  I, like many New Yorkers, suspected the recycling movement would soon be exposed as just another organized crime scheme.  Even today, I still toss the occasional plastic lid into the garbage proper – just for fun.  (It’s almost as satisfying as throwing books in the trash, which, as anyone who has worked in publishing will tell you, is no crime.  In fact, it can be therapeutic!)

So after a lifetime of East Coast sweat and corruption, Los Angeles looked pretty good to me when I moved here in 2001.  Most of the time, the skies were blue, not brown.  And you could actually find clean ocean water, if you knew where to go.  The weather was so glorious, you could literally ride a bicycle all year round!

Yet a sense of pessimism, even paranoia, seemed to prevail among the evolved, love-and-light Angelenoes I met.  One friend, who taught her kid to play “Tug-Some-More” instead of “Tug-of-War,” insisted on growing her own vegetables in the filthy soil of Venice Beach – because the produce in the supermarkets was full of chemicals.  (Wow, really?)  And even though she had a new baby, she felt passionately that soy was better for infants than dairy, since she had discovered dairy wasn’t really necessary to human survival at all – despite what we had always been told by the so-called experts in the federal government.

Hmmm.  What about all the wholesome, back-to-basics, raw butter-churning our ancestors did?  I wondered where I had been when dairy products became part of the vast rightwing conspiracy.

Young colleagues shook their heads and tsk-tsk’d over reports of the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a floating island continent the size of Texas (of course), comprised entirely of plastic trash, last seen bobbing somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii.  It sounded to me suspiciously like either a) an art project gone terribly awry, or b) an urban myth.

Whatever the case, it was clearly this generation’s version of giant-sized killer atomic insects.  Yet no one seemed very interested in reducing their consumption of bottled water.  Call me old-fashioned, but did these people even know water came out of a tap?  Meanwhile, I had difficulty imagining a whole continent made of trash.  Were they sure they weren’t talking about the United States, land of guns and WalMart?

Personally, I’d always thought America had made great strides with regards to the environment.  Air pollution was definitely down.  Drivers no longer used freeways as ashtrays or dumpsters.  People everywhere now picked up their dog poop under penalty of law.  Americans had really evolved, become more conscientious - to forge a distinctly cleaner nation.  Unlike certain other, burgeoning Third World countries we know….

Well, apparently not.  In the age of Oprahma, it’s chic to feel guilty and beholden to Mother Gaia, especially if you live in the land of plenty.  A whole new generation of twentysomethings now wants to “heal the planet” – as if no one had ever conceived of such a thing before.  Excuse me, little narcissists, but there were human beings here before you came along – who didn’t drive to work in SUVs the size of tanks.  We heard all the dire predictions of gloom and doom before you were even a fetus.

And we’re still here.

Of course, there are plenty of adults who’ve been suckered in by the Green movement too, thanks to Oscar winner Al Gore.  First, it was global warming, then “climate change,” now another ice age appears to be in the forecast.  It’s wonderfully nostalgic!  We all want to recapture our youth, I guess.

But there’s something disconcerting about grown people expressing “concern” when it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  Still, worrying about the weather is certainly a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the fact we’re all sitting ducks for a vast network of Islamic nuts.

Last summer, with gas prices exploding and my car imploding, I began riding my bicycle to and from work – quite a hike everyday, but well worth the bunions.  I always kept moving, never got stuck in the herd of puffing, grinding, obsolete machines that clog the arteries of this town more and more everyday.  Myself, I can’t wait till GM releases its first electric vehicle.

Meanwhile, I found I loved the childlike freedom of riding my bike, the sense of individuality and defiance it gave me, the thrilling absence of road rage, and the surprising intimacy I developed with my routes through the city.  You see things on a bike you never notice from a car.

One day on my way home, I passed a friend, who was actually on foot.  He was delighted to see me and exclaimed, “You’re so Green!”  No, I thought, I just don’t want to kill anyone to make a light.  That’s my contribution to Mother Gaia.

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Tags: Al Gore, automobiles, bicycles, climate change, environmentalism, garbage, global cooling, Global warming, green movement, Oprah, pollution, recycling, veganism
Posted Jan 23rd 2009 at 10:16 am in Featured Story, Media Criticism, Politics | 2762116 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/cwinecoff/2009/01/23/what-goes-around/What+Goes+Around...2009-01-23+18%3A16%3A59Charles+Winecoff