June 21, 2020

by drplasticpicker

Yesterday it was Teenage TikTok Users and Kpop fans versus Trump, and the Teenagers won! Teenagers were partially the reason why the Tulsa Trump Rally tanked. Dr. Plastic Picker, your local plastic picking pediatrician, is your biggest fan (the teenagers and not Trump). It is Sunday, June 21, 2020 and a brief newstory made it online and now I can’t find it. I did take a screenshot of the story.

It just goes to show the mainstream media is missing the cultural shifts that are happening on the ground. I mentioned to Mr. Plastic Picker last night that I thought CNN was projecting a completely different world that I see as a litter picker around the neighborhood. But the tweens and teenagers, they know what is going on. If you are a teenager, you will unlikely read this. But I wanted this seared into the blogsphere virtual pages that you have my utmost admiration and support. Most of the blog and Facebook readers are your parents, and they need to know how wonderful you all are. Teenage TikTok Users torpedoed Trump – this is the headline that CNN missed.

Tweens and teenagers get it. They are the ones that woke me about climate change. Greta Thunberg and Boyan Slat are/were teenagers when they started their environmental activism. It wasn’t Al Gore’s Nobel Prize in the early 2000s for the Inconvenient Truth that propelled me to devote the rest of my life to environmental activism. It was the passionate voice of a Swedish teenager who obviously had Autism Spectrum Disorder, and stood in front of millions and spoke the truth of do nothing adults on the climate crisis. When I watched Greta Thunberg’s speeches in front the UN, this jaded pediatrician had tears streaming down my face. In the time it has taken adults to reconvene another meeting, another advisory board, another townhall about any particular problem (even if that problem is important and those adults are on the side of right), the teenagers went out and did it! You embarassed Trump, the president that has systematically been anti-environment anti-earth anti-sustainability. And as a parent of a tween/teen and a long time pediatrician, I know the power of teenage ridicule. Not that my children or patients have ever ridiculed me. But tweens/teens used that power of teenage ridicule for good yesterday. As a pediatrician that has seen your sullen faces year after year when your parents dragged you into your check ups and I told you to put your phones down, I salute you!

And I wanted to let you know that much of Dr. Plastic Picker is about a middle-aged middle-management pediatrician being your ally. Your generation is on the right side of history. You are on the right side of #blacklivesmatter. You are on the right side of the plastic pollution crisis. When I talk about Big Oil/ Big Plastic/ Big Ag and how they have manipulated our earth and destroyed our climate and polluted our oceans, tweens and teens get it. When I started this Dr. Plastic Picker journey, my teenage patients were the ones that spoke up and said “good for you Dr. Plastic Picker.” They are the ones that were already working on behalf of the environment, and switched their family’s search engines to Ecosia before I even knew what Ecosia was https://drplasticpicker.com/ecosians-drplasticpicker-has-always-liked-alien-like-names-change-your-search-engine-to-ecosia-they-plant-trees-you-become-an-ecosian/. My teenage patients were already leading environmental clubs at school cleaning the local bays and beaches. They are already the ones who worked hard and studying environmental sciences in college. YouTubers with the help of many teenagers garnered enough donations to plant 20 million trees. My own tween/teens told me about this and now I know who Mr. Beast and Mark Rober are (do you? If not, go ask a teen). And those teens are why I declared on this blog Do Nothing Adult? Not Dr. Plastic Picker on a post November 2019 https://drplasticpicker.com/do-nothing-adults-not-drplasticpicker/. My own teenage son gave a speech at the climate strikes at his school. He mentioned his mother who is a pediatrician who goes and picks up trash as an adult that DOES SOMETHING. I keep that memory close to my heart.

While you teens are likely all sleeping now, as mine are, as you’ve been up all night flexing your cultural power to try to shift the political world through social media, I am that generation that raised you. I am that generation that is trying to protect you and to help you. Please know that this blog is for you, and for my children. Whatever happens to the world, and I am terrified at times, I wanted you to know that there are some adults that tried. We tried to do everything we can do to fix this world that we broke. I don’t know how to use Tik Tok. I don’t have all the answers, and I know you also do not have all the answers and you are still children. But I am learning from you. I am at Bag #215 of ocean bound plastic today, I salvaged #715 items and reployed them back into circulation. We have helped plant or preserve 200,968 trees and helped set aside 7,187 acres of mostly intact Rainforest through our donations. This is Dr. Plastic Picker reporting out to the Teenage Environmental and Political Heros out there what the Middle-Aged people are doing. Its 721AM and since all of you are sleeping, I’m going out to get a super big bag of litter. The one thing I do have that you don’t have is money, and I promise to be frugal with it and spend it for the power of good. We have so much more work to do together in the next 15 years! When you are 30 and I am at early retirement, let’s reconvene and see if we made a difference. God help us all.