Dear Editor:
On Youtube, you can search for and find a million peaceful music videos for relaxation, and by the viewer count, you will see just how many thousands of others have found the same music, mostly set to beautiful and repetitive bars of melody that, except for the most intrepid insomniacs, will put you and your pets into a deep sleep. It is accompanied by the most exquisite scenes of nature, which, when I watch them, gently lure me into a grey fog of sadness.
I grieve the eventual loss of this beautiful planet to me, my children and grandkids. I wonder if their future includes huge snow peaks in the “Rockies”, hearing the breath-catching calls of finches, warblers, robins, canaries. Will they be able to run through fields of wildflowers or forests of oak, maple, ash? Will they pick up chestnuts in the fall and marvel over their red-brown, slick and shiny surfaces? Will they even know that surface was made by nature and not in a plastics factory?
Some of those videos show you the most beautiful natural places on Earth. These places will be lost to us by the greedy and callous billionaires who destroy them by strip mining mountaintops, creating deserts from fertile land saturated with pesticides, single crop industrial farming and the indefensible use of chemicals.
We will be left longing for a place to rest because these videos will be showing us what we will never see again. Right now, looking at them, we can be thankful, and, hopefully, look for ways to express a respectful relationship to this wondrous planet.
So, if I have ruined your enjoyment of these beautiful videos, I am sorry. But I am not sorry for telling you about my experience because it is only by feeling what is being done, that we can become more conscious and act on our awareness before it is too late!
Gerry Walsh,
Erin