Commemorative Speech

Ever since I was born, I can’t remember a moment of being without you. You were always there to help me grow and you were there to nurture me. As I’ve grown up, my fascination with you has only continued to grow. How you face adversity. How you show us love sometimes, but hatred and fury at others. Some try to take advantage of you, thinking that you’ll be here always, unchanging, but the truth is, you can hurt too. I can’t think of where I would be without you, Mother Earth, other than floating aimlessly in space, and that is why I love you.

Just look at all you’ve been through in the years. Your birth is shrouded in mystery, as you came into the universe when times were strange. We weren’t around back then, but instead you were surrounded by strange creatures that, like we are now, are more occupied with each other than they are worried about caring for you. Of course, at a young age, you were likely to take a few spills, and you’ll get a few bruises, and when that rock hit you and you went into that dust cloud of a coma, we thought we might’ve lost you.

When you woke up, things had changed again. While asleep, our ancestors chased off the strange creatures, and you came upon our doorstep, so to speak, and you were now ours to take care of. The task was difficult at first. The air was cold, so we made fire to keep you warm. We invented the wheel so we could go on road trips with you. Things were looking good. We built great pyramids so we could get you closer to the swirling twilight mobiles above you, and we got on some floaties so we could cross the water and show you all the nice people in the world, even though we had to watch out for diseases.

When you got into your late teens, you went out with us on weekends and we wandered and explored with you, but perhaps in a drunken stupor, we got separated. We couldn’t find you, so we formed great civilizations to look for you, when we realized later that we only covered you up. People like the Romans thought that you were taken from them, so they fought to get you back. They found as many pieces of you as they could, but there was still unrest. About this time, some homies came and tried saying that you were nothing but a ball of trash in the garbage can of some larger being. Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Siddhartha, and others came, but we wouldn’t listen to their slander, so we sent them packing.

After trying to find what you wanted to do with your life, you settled down in a steady flow of work. You had some kids, but like you did when you were younger, they began to explore. We children looked at the air around you, especially your brethren that stop by to say hi, but then leave again for a couple months. We began to wonder about how big you were, and if there was a way that we might fall away from you if we strayed too far. We explored your reaches more, and found tons of your things to play with that we had never seen before. We found new friends, and enemies, and after the terrible twos, we reached agreements with the people around us and set up our own boundaries, and started to develop our punk rock lifestyle.

You bought us our first chemistry set and we accidentally blew two large holes in the kid next door, Japan. We started to get introduced to a whole new life that we didn’t know existed. Drugs were everywhere. We grew tired of them, and thought that maybe it was time to grow up. We learned some manners and stopped fighting with our old neighbors, the Russians. When we got a bit older we thought we’d find a job. We needed to dig deep into your pockets to find the cash, but we finally decided that we wanted to be policemen, and we would go out into the world and help people. The rest of the world looked down on us and took the NWA route of saying “F*** tha Police”.

So here we are. Our memory is fading a bit and we’re starting to find that old age everyone’s afraid of. We might be heading into an early retirement, just as you’re getting old, too. You’ve got back pains everywhere, making your tectonic plates move around every time you stand up. Every time you go to the bathroom, parts of Asia are destroyed, and your hair is turning white and falling slowly upon to the mountains of Colorado. Maybe this is what it feels like to be dying, but at least we’re doing it together. Here’s to you, Mother Earth.