Guilt

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Some of those who know me best … like the friends who went to Eastport with me a few weeks ago … recognize that I don’t respond well to guilt.  So if, for example, you happen to see me drinking water from a plastic bottle (a common enough sight around here), you might be better off not to mention the sacred name of David Suzuki.

This is not because I’m one of those blessed people who doesn’t react to guilt as a motivator, one off whose back guilt rolls as unbottled water off the back of a free-range organic duck.  No, my problem is just the opposite — I am so susceptible to guilt that I’m constantly haunted by all the voices in my head telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing.  Between the moral obligations, the health obligations, and the environmental obligations, I’m endlessly guilty.  And heaven help me when those obligations conflict with one another.  The knots of guilt into which I can tie myself are positively Gordian.  So for the sake of my own sanity (because that’s an obligation too) there’s a point at which I just have to draw the line and stop listening to the voices of guilt.

Of course, I feel guilty about doing that, too.

Bottled water is a case in point.  All my life people have been making me feel guilty about not drinking enough water.  “You should drink six to eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy!” has been the refrain I’ve heard from all sides, as long as I can remember.  And I never, ever even came close to that.

Then, someone invented bottled water.  Eureka! No, Mr. Suzuki, I don’t have my water shipped in from France, nor do I pay more for it than I do for gasoline — I pay about 25 cents per 500-ml bottle of Life Brand water from Ontario (I’d buy Newfoundland water, but it costs more … go figure).  And I don’t buy it because I distrust my tap water — St. John’s has some of the best tap water on the go.  No, I got hooked on bottled water because of the convenience.  Being able to pull a fresh, icy-cold bottle of water out of the fridge and take it with me wherever I went greatly increased my water consumption, and for the first time in my life I felt like I was getting enough water (as was my family).

Then along comes David Friggin Suzuki (and here I have to make it perfectly clear that I actually have the greatest respect for the patron saint of environmental causes, otherwise I wouldn’t be so easily guilt-ridden by him) to tell me that I’m doing wrong, that my water bottles are adding to landfills (even though all of mine get recycled, but I’m sure Dave will be along any minute to tell me why that’s a bad idea), and that the plastics in them may hide hidden health risks.  Greater than the risks of being dehydrated? Nobody seems to have the answer to that one.

It’s the constant plague of the Card Carrying Bleeding Heart Liberal — if it’s good for you, then the process that got it to you is probably destroying the environment. Or it was made in a factory by a seven-year-old Chinese slave. Or it only seems to be good for you, but will actually kill you later.  

And I am, as I’ve pointed out before, a CCBHL — this is not the rant of some smug neo-conservative laughing at the mass-produced guilt industry.  These are genuine, heart-wrenching moral dilemmas for me.  I stand in the supermarket with a kiwi in hand and think, “Kiwi.  A wonderful fruit, packed with nutrients, which my children will actually eat.  But the energy required to get the kiwi here from New Zealand, and its friend the clementine here from South Africa, will destroy the planet before my children get to grow up and get any use out of it, so what good is it to feed them fruit at all?” (Of course, I buy my little New Zealander and South African buddies despite the guilt, because the short-term almost always wins out over the long-term, and that’s the whole problem with this planet, isn’t it?)

Some of these dilemmas are particularly poignant if you’re a Card Carrying Bleeding Heart Liberal in Newfoundland.  Think, for example, of the initiative to eat locally which is so popular in North America at the moment.  Guess what I get to feed my family if I limit myself to things grown within 100 miles of our home? Potatoes, carrots, cabbage and turnip.  Precious little meat, except for the abundant codfish — oh, wait, we overfished that to extinction, didn’t we? Sorry.  As for fruit, we have a delicious sampling of … um … blueberries, partridgeberries, and a couple of other berries, all of which are in season for a couple of weeks in late summer.  The rest of the year, we’re out of luck.

Essentially, if I want to be kind to the environment and eat only local produce, I would have to be prepared to live as my ancestors did. And die as my ancestors did … of scurvy and malnutrition.

In some ways, this land of wide open spaces and unspoiled wilderness is a hell of a place to live for a guilt-susceptible, environment-loving CCBHL.  If we want to eat a remotely balanced diet, we have to bring food in from halfway across the world.  In fact, almost everything we use has to be trucked, shipped or flown in from far away, consuming gazillions of tons of fuel.  If we want to go anywhere — and travel is one of my absolute imperatives, another thing they’re now making me feel guilty about — we have to consume more tons of fuel just to get off the island.  And the climate ensures that we’ll consume even more fuel to keep from freezing to death ten months of the year.  In fact, about the only thing we’re saving on is air conditioning.

Clearly, the best thing I could do for the planet would be the one thing I’m completely unwilling to do: Move.

Any better suggestions, Mr. Suzuki?

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