By Mike Matthews
This one is inspired, is started, kicked off by a particular experience, but then most of my rants work that way. Something crawls under your skin for a long time, and one day it finally erupts, an explosion of rage. Lucky you that it comes at you here via the printed (we still call it printed) word. Lucky you that I’m not standing in front of you, gibbering and spitting, shitting my pants with rage. Lucky for both of us that we have Kim for me to send my rant to.
Wife and I had taken our seats for what turned out to be a brilliant, thoroughly artistic, intelligent, wonderfully resourceful production of a big old solid play by George Bernard Shaw. We sat in a comfortable modern theatre in a big west coast city. In came the audience clump by clump, twos and threes. Many of them, most of them maybe, with gray hair. And, several rows below us, in trooped a threesome as old as the others but looking younger and looking worse, because each of them carried a plastic bottle of water.
I am too civilized to shout imprecations in a theatre, unless I am on the stage. I did think about finding these simpletons at the intermission and scolding them. I didn’t do it; I spent the intermission looking at the program and chatting about how splendid the performance was. I am too civilized, too frightened of my wife.
You are thinking that it was those plastic bottles of water that roused my fury, water carried in plastic bottles. And yes, like most people I disapprove of plastic water bottles.
Of course it’s evil to carry things about in plastic containers, containers that come from that oil-based industrialization that maims and poisons the earth we live on.
My fury when I see plastic water bottles does not come just from that; it comes from the simple fact that the people who carry water with them don’t need that water. Uh huh.Think about it. When did you last need a drink of water and not be able to get it from a tap?
You don’t need that water! A few million people in Africa need that water, but you don’t.
I used to run marathons. In three or four hours of steady toil, most of us took gulps of water at the water stations, two or three times in the race. That was all we could slow down for, and it was plenty. At the end we’d have lost weight from dehydration, but that was not something to get excited about.
I don’t remember anyone ever walking away from a marathon toting a bottle of water. I’m sure that it is different now.
It’s easy to abuse water, use too much, not care for it, exploit it, spoil it, mishandle it, waste it. But when you abuse my patience, you pay.
