Birds and the Bees and plastic baggies.

You must be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi

I got this the other day from a friend via email. Things to think about.
I savor each bottle of honey I eat; I wonder about all the plastic bags I see flying
all over the world across the plains and in the trees. I re-read, John Fahey's story
about the blues guitarist Rosevelt Sykes and how HONEY is important to calm the
blues and any bad attitude you got on.... I think about The Secret Life of Bees, the
book by Sue Monk, and beautiful Goddesses, and our planet....Let's take care of it
and one another......


The Birds, the Bees, and Earth Day

New Rule: From now on Earth Day really must be a year round thing. And
in honor of this Earth Day, starting Monday supermarket clerks must
stop putting the big bottle of detergent with a handle on it in a
plastic bag. I don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but you see
that handle you just lifted the detergent with?


I can use that same handle to carry the detergent to my car. And stop
putting my liquor in a smaller paper sack before you put it in the big
paper sack with my other stuff. What, are you afraid my groceries will
think less of me if they see I've been drinking? Trust me, the broccoli
doesn't care, and the condoms already know.

Here's a quote from Albert Einstein: "if the bee disappeared off the
surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left.
No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no
more man." Well, guess what? The bees are disappearing. In massive
numbers. All around the world. And if you think I'm being alarmist and
that, "Oh, they'll figure out some way to pollinate the plants..." No,
they've tried. For a lot of what we eat, only bees work. And they're
not working. They're gone. It's called Colony Collapse Disorder, when
the hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, and all that's left are a
few queens and some immature workers -- like when a party winds down at
Elton John's house. Also, if your stinger stays up more than 48 hours,
call your doctor.

But I think we're the ones suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder.
Because although nobody really knows for sure what's killing the bees,
it's not al-Qaeda, and it's not God doing some of his Old Testament
shtick, and it's not Winnie the Pooh. It's us. It could be from
pesticides, or genetically modified food, or global warming, or the
high-fructose corn syrup we started to feed them. Recently it was
discovered that bees won't fly near cell phones -- the electromagnetic
signals they emit might screw up the bees navigation system, knocking
them out of the sky. So thanks guy in line at Starbucks, you just
killed us. It's nature's way of saying, "Can you hear me now?"

Last week I asked: If it solved global warming, would you give up the
TV remote and go back to carting your fat ass over to the television
set every time you wanted to change the channel. If that was the case
in America, I think Americans would watch one channel forever. If it
comes down to the cell phone vs. the bee, will we choose to literally
blather ourselves to death? Will we continue to tell ourselves that we
don't have to solve environmental problems -- we can just adapt: build
sea walls instead of stopping the ice caps from melting. Don't save the
creatures of the earth and oceans, just learn to eat the slime and
jellyfish that nothing can kill, like Chinese restaurants are already
doing.

Maybe you don't need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you
don't' need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out 100
billion plastic bags a year, and they all take a thousand years to
decompose. Your children's children's children's children will never
know you but they'll know you once bought batteries at the 99 cent
store because the bag will still be caught in the tree. Except there
won't be trees. Sunday is Earth Day. Please educate someone about the
birds and the bees, because without bees, humans become the canary in
the coal mine, and we make bad canaries because we're already such
sheep.

-- Bill Maher, host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" (Fridays at
11:00PM)