Years ago when I was a nipper in primary school (back when
we walked three miles to school barefoot, lived in a box in a dam, etc) our
school was based on a farm. Well, I say farm, but it was next to the farm – overlooking
a national road to the front, and a chemical plant to the side. Anyway, so I
have these vivid recollections of our lovely music teacher musically cooing the
words: ‘be glad you’re not going to school in the city, it’s a concrete jungle’.
At the time I thought, ‘ah okay but you see between the chemical plant and the
national road, we’ve our fill of city sights’.
Well, we passed the old schoolhouse on Sunday on our way to
lunch and I saw businesses all the way around it. You can’t even see the entrance
from the national road any more. Much of what was the old playground is now
parking for office drones. I bet if you drive up to the chemical plant and look
down, you’ll not see a single child running around and feel that pang of sweet
irony in your soul: beautiful, happy kids, while to the side of them hazardous pollutants
are being savagely pumped into the atmosphere. Ah, the good old days! They just
don’t make things quite that soviet anymore do they?
The moral of the story is that we should appreciate what we
have when we have it. Because it doesn’t matter how much our reality is
obscured by a chemical plant at the time – it really can get worse.
