I was given an assignment for the Griffon News a couple of weeks ago on recycling. While searching for sources I kept coming up short; not many people on campus care for anything green: unless it’s March with beer and leprechauns. People just want to live their lives without inconvenience. Recycling seems to be very inconvenient. It takes time away from iTunes, video games and our digitized masturbation machines.

The world outside is becoming this withering brown crap, so we hide ourselves inside a universe of our own making.

One where we get to choose who we are, how we act and where we can achieve 50 levels of sorcerer and blast fireballs at evil digital creature’s instead of the real world’s evil.

We just soak up the coal second by Greek second. Coal plants pump pollutants into the air so we can have asthma and legs that hurt when we walk across the house because we don’t use them. Instead of walking our brains out for fresh air we leave them plugged into the net for so long that Google tries to work up a hard drive we can plug our brains into. Just what we need, something else to wilt the wheat grass in your glass before you can drink it.

Our attention seems to be wilting to the point in which most of us are ADD, instead of the now standard ADHD. We need Aterol and several other medications to give ourselves the focus to work on allowing ourselves to breath.

I’ll admit that recycling takes money and not just the focus we don’t seem to have. If we have the money, then all we need is time to replace what we are using for power or paper or whatever our short attention spans will give us. It will take time to recover from the Aterol and non-recycling. There are things the campus can do to save itself money in the long run. But with our attention, we are short-run people. Everything in the short run costs too much for our sensibilities anyway. It’s much better to have instant gratification.

If we are going to gratify changes to the campus on recycling, then we will have to find the money first of all. A change like this on a much larger scale than just paper will mean a lot of money needs to be spent on solar panels and wind turbines and whatever else is sustainable.

But colleges are long term, unlike our memories. Even if it’s just a couple of solar panels and wind turbines to start with on one building, then let’s get started. A conversion to sustainable power is best done slowly anyway. That way the campus can tell if they are getting it right the first time, instead of having to come back three or four times.

It would be nice if the campus could follow Northwest’s model of producing most of its own power. Of course Northwest has an incinerator of its own where it burns paper pellets and scraps of wood that can’t be used for anything along with animal manure. Missouri Western doesn’t have to have an incinerator to produce its power. One would come in handy though, and if used properly the campus could burn most of its waste instead of paying to have it all hauled off.

But nope, this campus can’t do that. It costs too much to do, and besides, we are all too stuck-up to care about something that couldn’t possibly affect our children.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him when he recycled. So much for a dying green movement.