Hakuna Matata, We're F***ed

I'm depressed.

Like all good liberals, I'm a firm believer in recycling. At work, I've even been known to fish recyclable plastic items out of the trash, brush off the crumbs and coffee grounds, and put them in the recycle bin, where they belong. ("Damn it, Karen! The recycle bin is right next to the trash bin. Right next to it, Karen!")

But what's the point? This week I learned that China, which in the past would take our recyclables, sort through them, and use them to make more plastic goods to sell back to us, has decided that it is no longer profitable to do so. Not only have they refused to take any more of our recycling, they are sending boatloads of it back. All of that plastic waste is just going to end up in a landfill—or worse yet in the ocean, to be eaten by fish that will in turn be eaten by us. As a matter of fact, it's already happening. You could call it "The Circle of Plastic Life."

But, hey—hakuna matata! No worries, because our president doesn't believe there's a problem. In fact, while more and more places are banning single-use plastic items like drinking straws, he is selling them online to raise money for his re-election campaign. Which means that, sooner or later, someone will be eating a fish that ingested a drinking straw with "TRUMP" printed on it. (There's got to be a joke there, but I'm too depressed to think of one.)

"But wait," as the TV hucksters who sell such crap would say, "There's more!" This week I also read a BBC article that says scientists are now giving us just 18 months to do something about global warming.

18 months.

Again, not a problem for our president, who once famously tweeted that, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." Besides, even if it's not a hoax, it would be far too difficult and expensive to do anything about it at this point, right? Hakuna matata!

We're f***ed.

Or maybe not.

Fifty years ago, we put a man on the moon. It was an incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive task, but we had a president who believed it could be done and was worth doing, and he convinced our country that it could be done and was worth doing.

"We choose to go to the moon," he said. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win..."

Just imagine what we could do if we had a president who believed we could save the planet.