Go Green or Go Home

At the beginning of the summer I made a life-changing decision: I decided to go green. I had always found green people to be quite annoying. All my loyal readers can probably recall my astonishment towards Seattle's mandatory recycling that I experienced earlier this year. Part of me rejected it because I didn't believe the government should have control over what I do with my own trash, but the other reason was because the economics behind it doesn't make sense - it costs more to recycle than to make things new. It's just not efficient use of our tax dollars. So who cares about the environmental factors? Who cares about the dying whales? God made the earth and then gave mankind dominion over it. I never fell for the "mother nature" movement, that preserving the earth should be our first priority in life. I was no tree hugger. I gave my full support for oil-drilling in Alaska (in fact, I won a debate in high school over oil-drilling). And I thought the entire global warming issue was a hoax.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but none of those ideals have changed. I've only gone green so that whenever I do something that a liberal would find responsible, I can pat myself on the back and proclaim that I am now green. It's a way to gain instant respect and popularity amongst the Democratic community. I honestly really couldn't care less about what they think of me, but I get great satisfaction out of seeing them ignorantly light up when I say something as simple as, "I don't flush the toilet after every use because I want to conserve this beautiful earth's clean water. I'm green." Or when I explain to them that I am going to live close enough to campus to bike to class so that I won't use up the limited source of oil that our earth has left. Too bad they can't see past me to realize that the reason I am not using water or gas is to save my own money. I could care less about preserving the environment, but if that is a side effect of my actions, then so be it.

My family has really jumped on board with going green. For the first month of summer, we didn't turn on our air conditioning. We just kept the windows open and lived in harmony with God's beautiful creation. We may have been sweating, but we were putting our own desires aside to preserve energy for generations to come. Either that, or our AC was broken?

My brother has taken this to a whole other level that I am not dedicated enough to reach. He will wait until I am done drinking out of a glass or eating off of a plate and then use the same dishes I did so that we will have less to clean up later, conserving even more water by reducing the amount of dishwasher loads we have to do. He turns off all the lights in the house before he leaves, and turns of monitors on the computers, because apparently, "if 360 monitors would be turned off when not in use, the power that would be saved would be enough to power a car for an entire year." Good to know. I gave him a green high five for that tid bit of information.

So next time you go to flush the toilet, think twice. When you are asked if you want paper or plastic, choose paper. And when you want to grill out that perfect steak, do so with an electric or propane gas grill, because charcoal emits high levels of carbon into our atmosphere. Carbon emissions have the potential to kill the beasts of the field, such as longhorns, and who would want that?