Bruce Cameron - Day of the Earth

Apr 29, 20100

I think of all the holidays we celebrate, my least favorite is Earth Day. For one thing, I never know what sort of gift is appropriate. A jar of dirt, maybe? And it’s not clear to me why Earth even needs a “day,” since a spin on its axis creates a day. That’s like giving a man who owns a shoe store a gift of a pair of shoes.

Us: Hey, Earth! Know how you’ve given us all these days? Well now we’re giving you one!

Earth: I’m thrilled.

Don’t get me wrong: Earth is one of my favorite planets. A lot of my friends live there.

When I was in grade school, we celebrated Earth Day by drawing pictures of animals, who were apparently happy to be on the planet because they were all smiling.

In junior high, we realized we had it all wrong: Earth Day wasn’t for smiling, Earth Day was for being angry. There were bad people who were polluting the Earth, and they should leave immediately.

At lunch, the junior-high kids gathered out in the athletic field to protest stuff having to do with the planet. (We’d have to protest stuff not having to do with the planet on some other day.)

One of the fun activities we did was to hang “corporations” in effigy from a tree, because corporations were known to be bad for the planet, even though pretty much all of our parents worked for corporations.

We also signed a petition demanding the abolition of school buses — because the buses visibly belched black pollution from their tailpipes. We thought it would be better for the environment if we all walked to school, or rode our bikes, though most of us figured that if they banned school buses we’d just have our moms drive us.

When the bell rang, signaling the start of afternoon classes, none of us budged because we were so caught up in environmental protesting. We were discovering why conscientious, politically involved students all over the world are always marching and demonstrating and picketing — because then you don’t have to go to class.

We took down the dummy we’d hanged, and set it on fire and cheered, having a really good time — until Mike Gallagher declared that our fire was polluting, at which point we all agreed we didn’t like Mike Gallagher. Then someone suggested we sing some protest songs. But after hunting around in our mental song lists for a while, the only tune everyone seemed to know the words to was “The Way We Were.” That one didn’t get our blood boiling as much as we’d hoped.

By this time, several of the teachers had noticed there were no students in the school. This meant they could sit in the teacher’s lounge and smoke, which is what they did between classes unless they were assigned to monitor the bathrooms to make sure the students weren’t smoking. They were therefore a little slow to get angry at us.

Besides, we were doing real good for the planet, out there protesting on Earth Day by symbolically burning our parents’ employers. They decided to let us blow off steam a little. But when a handful of students tried to sing “The Way We Were,” they knew we had to be stopped.

We students knew that we far outnumbered the teachers and that the time had come to make a stand for our Earth and that we wouldn’t budge no matter what the faculty said or did — unless they threatened to call our parents. We were making a difference, not just for ourselves, but for every human being who lived on the planet, which we figured was a lot of them. We now had several petitions circulating, including one that said the dress code should be changed so that girls were allowed to wear shorts.

The teachers menacingly lined up on the hill looking down on us like the Sioux Nation facing Custer. But in the end, they sent a single warrior—the gym teacher, who blew his whistle and made all the boys do 50 pushups. That ended Earth Day.

Like I say, I’ve never cared much for it since.

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