I could see the floor!

Yesterday, a Black Crowes concert sent me on a trip down memory lane. I went to lots of concerts from the mid nineties until I became a mother ten years later. I’d often hop from the back of the venue to the front, hitch a ride on top of the crowd and repeat. Toward the end of the concert, making my way to the front became increasingly difficult, because I was wading through a pile of crap.

Obviously, when you finished your beer, you tossed the single use cup on the ground where it was trampled into a thick layer of sticky plastic shards, sprinkled with cigarette buds.

If you had asked me about that back then, I guess I’d have said something along the lines of…

Yesterday after the concert, I noticed the floor: I could SEE the floor! There were a few stray cups here and there, but it was not near as gross as it was ~25 years ago. The venue is still using plastic cups, but you’re supposed to return them, so they can be recycled. It’s far from perfect, but it’s infinitely better than the lasagne of trash that was no doubt impossible to recycle. More importantly, people are now aware that what you toss on the ground, doesn’t just disappear. And apparently, we can get used to returning our cups at the bar. Here in Europe, single use cups are being banned in many places and I foresee that at concerts too, soon they will be washed and reused.

I don’t know how or when this change started, but I imagine that some day, someone, somewhere, said something along the lines of:

… and started to do something about it.

I imagine they didn’t know where to start. I imagine they got some pushback as well as encouragement. I imagine it took way longer than they imagined beforehand. I imagine they got sick of it, maybe someone else took over. I imagine that when they go to a concert now, seeing how much has changed puts a spring in their step. It did for me.

I’m writing this to you, because if you feel that everything is just getting worse, this shows it’s not. A lot of things are getting worse and it often makes me feel like it doesn’t matter what I do. When I saw the floor, I saw that it must have been a person who went against the grain and initiated a difference for the better, even if it seemed that nobody cared at the time.

The Black Crowes brothers got into a fight around 2015 and didn’t talk to each other for years. Then one of them decided they could do better than that. They started to write new songs. Yesterday, it brought a bunch of people together who enjoyed their music and didn’t make a mess.

With love,