Six years ago I moved here from Russia. I was only 8 years old at the time, and thought America was a great country. But then as I grew older, I realized so many things wrong with it.
Out of the 6,602,224,175 people that live in this world, 301,139,947 live in the US alone. With that in mind, how the hell do we produce 25% of the entire world's pollution? Japan, China, Canada, Russia, Germany, Mexico, Britain, Italy, Iran, Australia, France, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Venezuela, India, Spain, Taiwan, South Africa and South Korea combined don't use as much petrol per day as the United States (1.3 to 1.4). And that is just the numbers people.
The United States may be a decent country, but we need much improvement, we produce far too much pollution, have an insanely high crime rate, overpay our athletes and underpay doctors, work too much and don't raise our kids by standard American values.
A few weeks ago my family and I went to Georgia for vacation. As we passed by a gas station on the way to the airport, I noticed that the cheapest price was $2.91. I also noticed that there were 5 Hummers filling up at the same time. Apparently, between January and June of 06, 33000 Hummers were sold. Even more interesting, in St. Louis last year, 300 Hummers were sold. Of the 300 sold, about 75 were for teenagers.
Even more interesting fact: in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor of California, he clearly stated that he wanted to make California a greener, and pollution-less state. What he didn't mention was that he has eight Hummers as his cars (that he only sold in September last year).
During the vacation in Georgia, my parents drank about two bottles of beer every day for six days. My uncle drank one beer per day. And my grandma would average about a beer every three days. That's 20 bottles of beer in 6 days. I drank an average of about three diet cokes for two days. That's nine cans. All together we ate three boxes of cereal. We also got a news paper every day and got rid of it the next.
So let me sum up the math: 20 bottles of beer, 9 cans soda cans, 6 newspapers and 3 cereal boxes. So when I take that stuff down to the garbage bin, I am shocked: there is no recycling bin at all! There are about 90 condos where we stayed, two giant garbage bins, and NO recycling bins. Kind of sad, considering we just sent $30 billion dollars to Israel, and we don't use any of that to improve our homeland.
The other day in Geography class, we were watching a National Geographic documentary on the book called Guns, Germs and Steel. In that, Professor Jared Diamond was asked a question by a New Guinean named Yali: “Why is that you white people developed so much cargo (goods, electronics, planes, guns, ext…) and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
That question reminded me of a movie that I saw a few years ago called “The Gods Must Be Crazy”. In the beginning of that movie, a pilot going from Madrid to Cairo drops his glass Coca-Cola bottle and it falls into the sand near a colony. A boy finds it and brings it back to his people. His people think that the glass bottle is the greatest thing that ever happened. They use it for many things. I'm not going to summarize the entire movie, but that part got me thinking about all the stuff we take for granted and all the stuff we can reuse that we can recycle.
One of my teachers has a “Reuse, Return, Recycle” poster on his wall. Underneath that poster is his garbage can, full of paper and empty Gatorade bottles. That just sickens me.
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