What if.

What if everyone had a job that was meaningful for them?

Maybe the deeper question is, what if everyone cared for each other?

It's been a year since the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and it's everywhere I am. Stories of people slopping through oil today in commemoration, the dark depression in the minds of the fishermen and women, and rage in the hearts of Americans directed at the faceless stone wall of British Petroleum.

There was an interesting caller today on the NPR program On Point. He was an activist. I liked him. He echoed the call that BP needs to take more responsibility (which they do, by the way), and then went on this fantastic little rant on how we only run into these problems because we, as a people and society, feel that it's worth the cost. We buy everything (even plastic) wrapped in a layer of plastic, in a plastic bag and take it to our plastic cars and then to our plastic home with our plastic dishes and countless other objects with petroleum derived ingredients. He argued that we have to accept accidents like this because we continue to live a life that requires us to drill off the coast of Louisiana to support it. His conclusion was that we don't take alternative energy seriously because it won't meet our needs, so maybe we should carefully review our needs.

The other week our family went on a hike at Bald Mountain state park. I love running and hiking with our family. After an hour or so has passed, the kids are lulled into silence and Dave and I have the most wonderful, random conversations-- just like we did when we were dating. This time I opened up and actually said out loud a lot of my political and environment views about the problems of society (which I haven't done for, literally, years because we've been living in Utah and I didn't want to upset the flow too much).

What came out of my mouth was something very similar to this gentleman's point, which he argued so vehemently. If people would just conserve just a little bit, like only have two televisions in the house, and only have then on for 3 hours each day, just think what that would do for our energy consumption. If everyone found a way to ride the bus once a week, or ride their bike or walk to work just once a week; If everyone picked up 1 piece of trash a day, or carpooled with a co-worker, or turned off their power strip at night or put on a sweater or put up one solar panel or-- the list goes on.

What if people cared?

What if everyone had a job that was meaningful for them? And we could stop making plastic bags and assembling pieces of junk and spending more time helping people and feeling happy, instead of selfish and alone.

What if, indeed.