The Red Button

People, they inhabit the entire earth, yet they naturally have a habit to destroy the world around them and themselves. All concern for nature and the human body becomes unimportant at some point, either for no reason at all, such as the case with cigarettes, or because of greed, as is the case with Scott, who will later be discussed.

Brandon Schrand, in his essay “All That Glows,” shows the destructive nature of humans through the media of bombs. He along with some of his friends form a posse that creates bombs and detonates them in a silica quarry. They go so far as to almost kill one of their group’s members by accident and to place a fake bomb at school as a prank. In “All That Glows” Schrand explains the excitement of a bombs explosion evoking emotions with the passage “When the bomb blew, one of its caps shot like a missile, ricocheted off a slab stone, and missed Scott’s face by two feet. We all heard its whine, but Scott claims to have seen the projectile. It was coming right at me!” They continue to build many more bombs after this one even with the presence of a possibly lethal accident. This group of boys would do anything for the thrill of a bomb, even though they knew it could kill them. The idea of self-destruction does not hinder them. One may even be able to go as far as to say that they only continue only because of the dangerous aspect. This truly explicates the idea of disregard for the self and shows that people will do dangerous things for simple reasons even if their life hangs within the balance of their choices.

Schrand pulls the idea of pure death of the environment by mankind into the picture with a very simple image when he and his friends created a fake pipe bomb as a prank at school, as a result eve...

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... into fertilizer, this change also releases many harmful chemicals into the air, and once again the earth’s atmosphere is being destroyed.

People believe they own this planet, and in fact they do not. This planet was created for us to live on, not for us to use and abuse it as some would say. People want to do what they want, when they want to do it. They do not care who they harm and they do not care whose life they are ruining. People who smoke destroy people’s lungs without even a second thought about it, or they will blow off cigarettes causing cancer. They will say “I know many people who smoked all of their life and never had cancer” just as an excuse to do evil. They put off their problems on others so that they can destroy and create more problems for other people to try to fix. People are a cruel animal, and one day we will push our own red button of doom.