Column | Tons of waste to save the world

The customer service representative said everything would be fine. “Have a nice day!” she typed into her message box. The SIM card that was sent to me, she said, was absolutely great. But he wasn’t exactly that. “It’s pink,” she typed eagerly. “And once it’s in your phone, it never gets out.” Before I could bring my problem to her attention again, she typed “have a nice day!” and she was gone. She was really very cheerful. And her name was Godiva, that captivated me as well.

Would Godiva be right and would everything indeed work itself out? A college student once told me that during a downpour, she would type “everything will be fine” into a search engine bar. She was then amazed at what turned out to be all right in the world.

Today this still works. From social inequality to illness, everything will be fine. Although I immediately find a pastor, but that could be due to my search profile, which rejects so much naive optimism and quotes the lullaby that Mary once sang to Jesus. “Sleep my son and do not cry, the time of suffering will come.”

While Godiva had long since frolicked through another meadow, I looked down at my phone. He still made it half way. At the same time, my laptop wobbled and my Wi-Fi network sputtered. Godiva could frolic all she wanted, but I didn’t get to work like that for a while. Optimism is beautiful, on the other hand there is such a thing as reality and my entire physical infrastructure collapsed in it. I whistled dejectedly.

Every citizen of the world at this moment in history is asking himself the same probing questions: what should I do? And how hopeful and cheerful can I be? Since I couldn’t work anyway, I mused about the relationship between attitude and reality – and so it came to be that I thought back to the gathering of the Rainbow Family in the Routt National Forest in the US state of Colorado, this summer.

The Rainbow Family is an idealistic association of people with an interest in nonviolence and alternative lifestyles. “The largest non-member organization in the world,” she says on her own page unofficial website. “We gather annually in the National Forests to pray for peace on this planet.” It’s that you can’t join it, but otherwise you wouldn’t know why everyone wouldn’t join the Rainbow Family.

Now the Family wanted to celebrate its 50th anniversary in the same Colorado forest where it had begun 50 years earlier. Of, like The Washington Post wrote“hundreds of tents, lots of guitars and drums, a little bit of nakedness, smells of marijuana, vigorous vegetable chopping, lots of hugs and a very, very long line for burritos.” The locals protested.

The Rainbow Family had nothing but good intentions. “We believe that peace and love are a wonderful thing, and there is not enough of that in this world.” Hence praying. “In addition, we have a strong orientation to care for the Earth.” But here things got complicated, because with all those tents, the Family wouldn’t take good care of the forest at all: the rush of 10,000 nonmembers would have a devastating effect on the National Forest.

In effect, an entire city is arriving at a biodiversity hotspot, said the local sustainability council director against The Washington Post. “If the Rainbows want to focus on praying for world peace, let them do it in a place where it’s the only event, not somewhere where it has loads of environmental impact.” The Sustainability Council had a point with this, but the Family didn’t just give up on its devastating plan to take good care of the planet. She decided to politicize.

It’s about politics, said a retired healthcare worker from Oregon. “The right of the people of America, the United States, to assemble peacefully – it should be a right – to the land of the people, the people’s land.” That right to pray in the woods was all the more important at a time when fascism was advancing, he said.

So brought the Rainbows 403,200 cigarette butts and 84,000 liters of urine with drug residues to the wilderness to save the world. The whole event was a complicated collision between good intentions and reality: I sat motionless behind my sputtering laptop. Actually, I was supposed to write an op-ed to promote peace, but I didn’t do anything. Did not work. Didn’t write anything. Called nobody. And all things considered, today I was doing more good for the world with this doing nothing than I could have ever done with opinion – that’s how, paradoxically, everything worked out.