My lord, I’ve been spending too much time on Facebook.
I’ve neglected my role here, as RPN. My deepest apologies.
To catch you up to the story quickly (this would be Chapter 12 for those reading at home), our hero in the story has taken to walking the Earth in order to save it.
Which sounds all grandiose and shit, but is actually much more mundane and all work-like in this our Real World.
There are so many problems to fix you see, and only so much time in which to do so. What to do first? Where should I focus my talents *now*.
And so I picked one, as so many do in these days, off the List of Craig. A truly wondrous resource, which once again reaffirms the fact that we are wondering into a new Age of human civilization (the Information One).
So in order to continue the trend of outputting so much information at once onto the Interwebs at once, and blasting it off into the ether of other’s minds, I shall continue my story about my current job.
I’m walking the world to save the world (mainly because I like vague self-referential loops, as illustrated in Chapter something or other).
Now I’m doing so literally. With an organization that focused on a problem near and dear to my heart, electronics.
I’ll let the New York Times update you on the solution that many states have adopted.
This month, Edward Reilly, 35, finally let go of the television he had owned since his college days.
Although the Mitsubishi set was technologically outdated, it had sat for years in Mr. Reilly’s home in Portland, Me., because he did not know what else to do with it, given the environmental hazards involved in discarding it.
But the day after the nationwide conversion to digital television signals took effect on June 12, Mr. Reilly decided to take advantage of a new wave of laws in Maine and elsewhere that require television and computer manufacturers to recycle their products free of charge. He dropped off his television at an electronic waste collection site near his home and, he said, immediately gained “peace of mind.”
Over the course of that day, 700 other Portland residents did the same.
I have been working, for the last three months of so, on legislation in Texas, of all places, for similar services. This being Texas, and not Maine, our effort ultimately failed thanks the diabolical pen of one James Richard “Rick” (a.k.a “Jimmy Dick”) Perry. And his fabulous hair.
More info on that here.
So I spent three months walking the earth, talking to folks, telling them to write their Representative, and their Senator. And after the bill passed the House and the Senate, I asked folks to write to Rick Perry, and tell that [redacted] they supported the bill. And they did. Hundreds of them. Personally, for me, I picked up and delivered over 200 letters. I know Perry got many, many thousands more.
And then one man with one pen erased that effort. Or so it would seem, and so it did seem for the week or so after it happened.
Then one day, around last week, as we began to focus our attention on another aspect of the electronics recycling problem (and it is one, don’t kid yourself. Each American consumes and shits out about five pounds of it a year, and someone has to eat that shit, if we don’t deal with it ourselves) I got my first real achievement in my walking the earth thing. Rick Perry’sPen had nothing to do with it, and affected it not in the least.
I didn’t say how much would help, or really much more than how much it meant to me that he do something. The organization with which I am working has an Ultimate Membership Level. The way the walking the Earth thing works, in the Real World, has a lot to do with talking to people out on the street. Or, more directly, in their homes. Hence, there’s a good bit of walking the street, and a good bit of knocking on doors, and some sweet, sweet (and sometimes bitter) bits of talking to folks. Good, Texas, Folks. About the Environment and Electronic Waste (which is oh-so-sexy as cause, I know…).
A challenge, to say the least. As our group is a political lobbying organization, we ask people who agree with what we are doing to help out with the campaign financially. We have an Ultimate Membership Level. So to finally continue the real story, I didn’t say how much to help.
I just left a thought, and a pen. And he used it to erase Rick Perry’s slight, and I realized one pen can’t stop the world from turning. Not with with so many people walking on it in the same direction.
The direction I walk is toward one of our many possible futures. The one I aim for is a sustainable future, where we get to have our electronic toys and don’t have to eat them too.
Walk with me, if you would…
….
Anyway, in case anyone is wondering (Hi Mom!) I’ll be walking the Earth tomorrow. We should hit 100 degrees or so, which is like, boiling, in metric.
peace,
Wah
