Have you ever thought about how one decision can change your whole life? How that one cigarette will lead to another and another; and how those cigarettes will lead to breathing problems. Then imagining your body was the Earth and that those cigarettes were all the pollutants. How our breathing issues would be similar to the air quality on our planet. Well, I guess you wouldn't have; because neither did I until now. Neither did anyone else for that matter. They could have fixed this a long time ago when we first started seeing the warning signs. But now it's too late. Now we may not have much longer to live. If it wasn't for our need to be the best and always be right, then maybe we would have actually focused on the real issue and tried to fix it. Our world is dying and it's all our fault. I don't know exactly what made that last push for me to notice that something was seriously wrong. Maybe it was the lack of breathable air, or maybe it was that we couldn't even leave our houses without covering up all our skin. We were warned for as far back as I can remember. "We need to take care of our planet, it's the only one we have", "if we go into nuclear war it will kill us all", and "replant 3 trees for every 1 that you cut down". Did we listen; no, we always say we will listen to help make ourselves feel better about sitting around doing nothing, but it doesn't help. Yeah, we may start off picking up our trash off the streets and out of our oceans, but then we go and dump it on our landfills. We did try to burn the waste because we were running out of space for our trash, but it didn't help. Burning our trash just released even more toxins and finish in the air making it even harder to breathe. Have you even smelled melted plastic mixed with other chemicals and waste smells? Probably not, but you can imagine how terrible it was. The smoke was so thick that we couldn't help but cough and gag. Many people got severely I'll and some even died from ingesting burnt mold that was on some of the garbage. Even with our attempts to save our planet, it backfired and made it worse. Maybe if we had some done something sooner it would have actually worked. What did we expect to happen, we had enough warnings to know that we couldn't keep going on that way forever. Sometimes I still close my eyes and go back to when my brother and I would play in the backyard. The feeling of the sun on our skin or the rain droplets lightly hitting our faces as we tilt our head back and hold out arms out to our sides embracing the feeling. I miss it more than anything. We can't do that anymore. After that final bomb dropped 5 years ago we lost all hope of that ever happening again. It's so sad to think that some children will never know what it was like to play outside in the freshly cut grass barefoot. I just wish it could go back to the way it was before; before all of this. But, is there even any hope for us anymore, because it's going to take more than I think we can even muster to fix what we caused. How do you fix a terminal cancer patient, when you are the cancer?
