By Laurene Williams, HoneyColony Original
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” — Mahatma Gandhi
It’s not easy following in Gandhi’s footsteps and becoming a force for real change. Obama gave it a shot but his “change” went down the drain as soon as he started populating his payroll with bankers doused in bailout dollars and handpicked Monsanto execs pushing Roundup. With so many big business wheels set in motion, his primetime charisma just couldn’t swing it. Or maybe his style was all wrong—a curious combination of being too superhero-ish and singular?
Bees make for a better Gandhi. No one can get pissed at them when they break campaign promises. When they land on the cover of Time Magazine, no one can accuse them of trying to develop a cult of personality. They don’t charge for PSAs and they don’t have bad hair days.
And most importantly, when we blog about them, they don’t gripe about being misrepresented or misunderstood. Their publicists and spin doctors don’t call us. And maybe it’s this silence that makes the bees the ultimate face for social change.
Instead of protesting in the streets or doing gut-wrenching prison hunger strikes or camping out in Zuccotti Park or filing class action lawsuits, they simply lie down and die when we mistreat them.
They’re a reminder that people today, even in the age of lightning-fast social media and crazy connectivity, are on the slow train to destruction, completely dependent on a system of legislation that’s built out of bureaucratic scrap metal. The always over-the-fiscal-cliff budget that fuels K Street progress is completely out of touch with the junk in our air and the toxic sludge in our fatty tissue. Waiting for policymakers to act in time is like waiting for your grandfather to grow hair. It may never happen.
News analysts can moan about what’s really causing the bee die-off catastrophe, but the problem isn’t that this group or that group got their facts screwed up, or that some non-profit wonks are too partisan. It’s that we have too many problems to choose from. Like Gandhi in India in 1930, the bees are struggling with an onslaught of ills. We could each write a book listing the many ways we’re telling these pollinators to drop dead. Instead, we begrudgingly feast on Bee Die-Off Eco-Soup.
Bee Die-Off Eco-Soup ~ Recipe for Disaster
Recipe makes about 7 billion servings
Ingredients:
• a few oceans’ worth of polluted water containing plastic bags, DVDs, electronics, and everything else in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
• 2 billion pounds of pesticides strong enough to make organisms mutate
• 700 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions from every industrial plant and motor vehicle on Earth
• 200 billion teaspoons of fracking juice
• 999 zillion pounds of genetically modified seeds
• 4 trillion tons of genetically modified organisms
• 8 trillion buckets of chemical run-off water from health and household products, and the foods in our bathrooms and kitchens
• hot pepper
Directions
1. Bring the ocean water to a boil. Add the hot pepper and the 700 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions. Cook for a long time.
2. Add the pesticides and the genetically modified seeds. Stir. Turn heat to low and cook forever.
3. Add red dye #40 for color (optional, if you have some on hand).
4. Add GMO chicken, beef, or tofu (optional).
5. Add the remaining ingredients and keep stirring.
6. Garnish with leftover meds from your old prescription bottles. Pop the caps and shake to taste. Serve hot.
This stuff is addictive, like crack, cigarettes, peach cobbler, or Coke. So we know what’s upon us. All of us who aim for alternative healthy lifestyles, who try to avoid everything but the perimeter of the grocery store, are aware that change has to happen in our households—in whatever ways we can afford to modify old habits.
Then maybe, if we’re lucky, the bees will come back in full swing.
Bee The Change.
Laurene Williams is the Senior Editor at HoneyColony.