Saving water

13 08 2008

As all we proud Australians know, we are in the middle of a severe drought.

Let me now digress from my writings to look up the word “drought” on the acclaimed internet resource Dictionary.com

drought [drout]
  1. a long period of abnormally low rainfall, especially one that adversely affects living conditions

Oh really? You would think that with all our swimming pools, front lawns, mammoth gardens and hour-long showers that we were living permanently in the middle of the monsoon season. Unfortunately, the truth must be told: Australia is, in reality, a pretty dry place.

For those who cannot understand the big large words (such as abnormally: 4 syllables!), the word “drought” simply means that there is NO WATER. Yes that’s right, that strange clear liquidly stuff that comes out of taps does not appear because of magic (I can see you crying now). It is, in fact, running out and when it’s gone, you’re going to die.

Of course something as critical and urgent as water will without a doubt be practically completely ignored by politicians. Sure, they talk about and show off their grand scheme to save the Murray but when it comes down to crunch time, we’ll all be down here fighting over that last cup of fresh water (which is actually just a liquefied form of the excess ego politicians excrete every week or so)

But let us not blame the politicians; they’re obviously doing the best job they can. Let’s have a look at the people eating up water like a sponge (a very large and yellow sponge). There’s your neighbour with that garden that takes 2 Olympic sized swimming pools to water (yours, of course, would be just as good except you are a good water-conserving citizen), that guy down the street who washes his car with a hose every Sunday morning, your sister whose showers take an eternity to end and those large cities to the North who think that Adelaide is a backwater not worthy of some H20.

Or it could be those large farms that seem to need three times as much water as an entire city does. Such a smart decision it was to grow cotton, rice and grapes in the world’s second driest continent: when we’re all shrivelling up like prunes in the sun, at least we’ll have those cotton underpants to wear.

However, even with all this throwing of the blame, one fact remains: if we do not fix this problem fast, we’re stuffed.

And so, as we sit on the shower floor during our hour long deluge, slowly draining the Murray, we remember this one thing:

It’s always the other guys fault.








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