Inform

I think it’s important to inform, but it seems people take their knowledge for granted.  I look at so many different organizations that are trying to accomplish various things and they seem so frustrated. They look down at people who don’t believe the same things that they do, but I think they never really considered that they might have actually missed a step. And that is just informing people. Granted, not everyone takes that knowledge and actually does something with it, but when my teacher started talking about what could happen to our world if we didn’t start taking action, out of the twenty people who were ‘listening’, at least one person that I know of took action and that was me. Obviously. If you talk to thousands of people, most will probably let your words go in one ear and out the other, but there could actually be a person, two, maybe even three people who are actually listening and motivated enough to do something with it.

In my blog, I try to make it mostly informative.  I try to make the practices that I suggest such as dumpster diving as easy as it could possibly be. I definitely have a lot more work to do, but my goal is break it down so that you have all the tools and all the extra work is taken out of it. For other things, I try to relay my experiences so that you can avoid doing the things that I did that made the process a little bit harder. I try to give you as much information as I can find so you can make an informed decision about the life that want to live.

Solutions, I believe, are equally important. It’s annoying that time after time people give you the problems…the countless problems of everything, but they never give you any solutions. How are you supposed to change something if you don’t know how. Wouldn’t you have already been doing the right thing if you already knew how? It seems to be true for almost every sermon I’ve ever heard. They always point out what is wrong with me, maybe even why I should fix it, but they never tell me how. It gets very frustrating to say the least.

Since becoming informed of what damage people as a whole were doing to the environment was so vital to my coming to realize that I needed to change, I realize that this is probably the case for a lot of people.  In college I’m taking a ‘listening’ class which is almost as dull as it sounds, but after my teacher woke me up from my apathetic slumber, I realized how much other things I had dismissed simply because I didn’t care enough about the topic that they were initially talking about to listen to the rest of whatever they were saying. I had thought I had heard it all before, and nothing had made any difference before so why would it now? I didn’t care about anything, so I missed so many things that are really important things to understand. After that, I really came to understand how important listening is. I think a few people are still missing it in the class. As dull as it and as much as I ‘think’ I know, I make myself listen because I could miss something important.

Since I have come to realize the vitality of informing people, I have started to take steps in doing just that. They’re small, but I have to start somewhere.

Every Friday, my listening class has what’s called ‘literature day’. Everyone gets up reads a piece of literature such as a quote, poem, short short story, etc.  I decided that I would take a day and read some mind blowing statistics that I had found. Some people I know were listening because they gave a verbal response, but I still don’t know whether any body was listening to the point they actually realize that action needs to be taken. I know that in the past when I’ve heard a speech where someone was calling a group to action, I consider it for as long as they’re talking about it and then I leave and I forget all about it. I wish I could figure out why I made that connection when I listened to my teacher. I think it was partly because he gave me a reason to. When I hear most people trying to convince to do something they never give a reason to. They just say, “you should do this” or “you should do that” without ever giving a reason why.  He said, “Environmentalists have predicted that if we don’t change our ways, in x (I don’t remember the exact number) amount of years, the air around us will be so toxic that we will have build huge plexi-glass domes that covers portions of the U.S. We’ll have to figure out how to create our own water, sunlight, air because we have poisoned our environment so much. The only way we’ll be able to travel is through plexi-glass tunnels.” He didn’t say it exactly like that, but I hope you get the point. Whether it’s true or whether it’s just some alarmist doesn’t really matter. The possibility that it could happen is so disgusting to me that I’ll do anything to try and make sure that I am not the reason that it happens.

The other day, I posted a vignette that I wrote for my creative writing class, but since it was too long, I had to shorten it to just my dumpster diving experience.  When we write a three chapter short story then I’ll be bringing back Dixie. My teacher was disappointed that I took Dixie out of the story, but I just couldn’t find a way to do it justice with such a short word allotment. My teacher loved the whole idea behind the story and she didn’t seem off put by the whole dumpster diving thing either. I was pretty excited about that.

My mom is pretty much my biggest fan and she’s taken the dumpster diving idea and run with it. She has a day care and every year she does a ‘Mom’s Night’, a party for the moms of all her kids. They do a craft, a spa type thing, food and all that. This year she did an upcycling theme. She made the same type of crafts that I’ve been posting, she made decorations out of junk mail and other assorted recyclables, and she did a game where she asked a bunch of questions about what the different facts about recycling. Who ever got the most facts right won the game and they got to pick one the crafts that she had made as a prize. My mom said that almost everyone received the idea really well and asked a lot of questions. She has one person in the group that is judgmental about pretty much everything, so you know.  She posted pictures of everything that she had created on her Facebook.  She got a lot of comments and people asking where she got things to make them and how she made them. It was pretty exciting.

So far this is what I’ve been doing to spread the word. It’s not much, but it’s a matter of getting courage. With the success of the mom’s night I’m seeing the possibility of a dumpster diving group coming together in this small town somewhere in the future.