The Trouble with Mother Nature
by Aloysia C. Hamalainen
It seems that Mother Nature is a bit out of sorts of late. You’ve seen it. She’s been running hot, then cold. A few days of peace and serenity, then wham! She blows up. What is her problem?
I think I have a clue, perhaps a little insight into all these histrionics. Looking at it in a purely geo-scientific and analytical way, using my extensive background and years of experience, I conclude that Mom Nature is starting to go through her M-word (has meno in it) phase. I completely understand and even feel her pain.
What, you don’t think I know what I am talking about? You want the date, the proof?
Here it is. You’ll see that I’m right — and I don’t like your attitude one bit.
At many, many, many millions of years old — even billions, but that is not polite, and she really is holding up well — Mother is good and ready for her middle age. She works very hard, making baby islands with nasty hot lava, or glaciers — and that is cold work. Just maintenance on all those oceans with all that livestock is a day’s work, I tell you. She does this day in and day out, starting early and probably just grabbing a hot dog or something for lunch. She is not on expense account.
She comes home, and sometimes the commute is a real drag with all those cars with only one person choking up the asphalt rivers and pathways.
She schleps the groceries she picked up on her way home into her kitchen, which she had left neat and tidy just that morning. What the blazes? It is a mess with hazardous wastes and spills all over the counters, and the sinks are overflowing with dirty stuff.
That is not all. Where are her little helpers? Well, if Mother is middle-aged, that makes her offspring in the teen-to-20 age group. They are no longer the sweet-smelling innocents that were so happy and eager to see her. Sure, they made little messes with their blocks and tracked some mud in the house when they played outside. But now they are bigger, louder and more demanding.
If they meet her at the door with a smile, these days, her kids usually want something from her and are in a hurry to get it. ‘Hi, mom, c’mon, I need the car keys, I need some money, I need to drill for oil, I need to chop down a forest, yada, yada, yada …’
Or, if she goes to their bedroom to ask for a little help, she gets her ears blasted out by a cacophony of metallic sounds and unintelligible ranting (probably best kept unintelligible) made possible by gifts she gave, like the sub woofer for a birthday, or shoot, that day she showed them how to split the atom to make all that nice energy.
If she is able to open the door and look past her snarling offspring, she could probably just have a stroke right there. Just where do they get all this stuff? So much of everything, just lying all around. Much more than they could ever use rationally. So much waste. And all the lovely gifts she’s given strewn about, not taken care of. She certainly has a right to say something about that!
So, using purely geo-scientific terms, she stamps her feet and has a tantrum. Maybe a mudslide, or a flood will work, just to get their attention. Look out if she has to get that vacuum cleaner, because she’s just going to clean up that mess no matter what is in the way.
I also think she has been unfairly maligned in the temperature department. Sure, she gets a few warm days, and they make her uncomfortable, but it’s those kids messing with the thermostat with all their chemicals that have upset her ozone layer. How many times does she have to say, ‘Just leave it alone!’
Thankfully, her kids are not always that bad, and she will always love them. It makes her so happy when they make an effort and clean up after themselves, and maybe they are learning how to take care of things better when they see the damage their negligence does. They can recite in their sleep what she’s told them since they were little: ‘If you open it, close it. If you spill it, clean it up. If you break it, fix it or tell me about it.’ Maybe they finally get it.
I know that all she does is worry. After all, what will happen to them when they move out and go to another planet or even solar system. They have to know how to take care of things and be respectful. They may not be able to come back, and she may not even be there, as she keeps telling them.
I would like to share this scientific data with NOAA, or whatever important government agency is interested in helping Mother cope. She certainly is not getting much help at home, as Father Time spends a lot of that in his recliner in front of the television, watching one game after another. He’s a big part of her problem, too, if you know what I mean. He’ll help out when he can, but he has his own eons to do, and so much of the local stuff falls on Mother and her kids.
Frankly, I am getting more and more put out over what I just told you. There is a limit to her patience, and I’m not sure where it is but it just makes me so mad — I think I’ll go and have a tornado.
