What's an "Egg Drop"?
Well, to quote the folks at 2014eggdrop.com: "It is the most exciting version of the traditional Easter Egg Hunt you can find. Tens of thousands of plastic eggs, filled with candy, will be dropped from a helicopter onto a grass field." Oh, super.
Here's a shot from an Egg Drop in Lake Highland, Texas.
Agghhhh, I'm going to sound like such a party pooper here, but big surprise; I'm a party pooper. Dropping thousands of plastic, candy filled eggs from a HELICOPTER? Between stunts like these, and another genius marketing event known as a "balloon release", I must take a moment to take stock of what we as a people of earth do in the name of celebration.
We're the worst.
Even though they litter in opposite directions, Egg Drops and Balloon Releases don't cancel each other out, I checked.
I keep coming back to what feels to me like a legitimate question: What right does a person or company have to voluntarily cause great harm, arguably permanent harm, to the environment, to OUR environment? To our land, our oceans, our animals, our food supply?
I can't wrap my head around it. We know for a fact that plastic never goes "away", once it's chemically blended and formed, it's here forever - from sandwich bags to straws, beach buckets to plastic Easter eggs, like forever-forever. So why are we allowed to make disposable stuff out of it? Disposable plastics should be obscenely expensive. Call it the "Oh, you want a disposable plastic fork? Okay, but you're required to pay for the space it will take up after you use it for a whole twenty minutes" tax. Let's see, that's the cost of the petroleum based fork, so $5.00 for that, and another $25.00 of earth-rent for the spot in the ocean where it will continue to float around for decades after you're dead. And honestly, that's a bargain - we'll be generous and only charge you for 100 years worth of earth-rent - that's a mere .25 cents a year. Oh, and we have to add on the "Just in Case" fee - the one for just in case your stupid fork ends up in the stomach of an albatross or a whale, contributing to the animals painful and untimely death. At $30 plus bucks a pop, I don't think I'd be finding many forks lying around.
Oh! This is my 1 hour plastic-trawl-haul from a local park a few days after Easter - No Helicopter Egg drop here, but it was these broken egg-shards I found on the field that got me thinking about the absurdity of how plasticized modern day celebrations have become.