Message in a Bottle

Just so you know, there are zero reported cases of anyone ever contracting herpes from a drinking fountain. I checked, and I have to say, "herpes" is one of my least favorite things to type into a search engine. You never know what's going to come up. 

Hint: it wasn't this.

But the thing about herpes is that, like most (non-airborne) viruses, it only lives outside of the body for about ten seconds. So when using a drinking fountain, as long as you don’t put your mouth completely over the bubbler immediately after some other moron who just did the exact same thing, then it is virtually impossible to contract any communicable disease from it. Besides, when you stop to think about it, a drinking fountain really is a miracle of modern infrastructure. So drink up.

Just don't wash your butt with it.

And while you're enjoying that cool, refreshing drink, consider that approximately one out of ten people in the world does not have access to clean water (and one out of three does not have access to a toilet). Here in the US, we take this resource for granted and have free public drinking fountains all over the place — but they are steadily disappearing because people are convinced that bottled water is somehow safer. Of course, with enough deregulation, I suppose it will be. In the meantime, huge multinational corporations are taking this life-sustaining substance that has been on earth for about 4.6 billion years, marketing it with some airbrushed mountains and slapping on nutritional information and a goddamn expiration date. An expiration date on water. Let that sink in for a minute, because it serves as an apt metaphor for everything else that I'm about to discuss.

It expires 11/2019. I wonder what happens then.

Most people are aware that Evian spelled backwards is naïve, but did you know that gullible spelled backwards is ignorant? No? Good. Then you might also know that most bottled water is just municipal tap water with a fancy label. It usually comes from the same source and it is likely filtered by the same process as the water that runs through your city's pipes. That is to say that you could save yourself some money by just filling up a water bottle that you already have at a drinking fountain. As an added bonus, you get the satisfaction of feeling superior to the person next to you who just spent hard-earned money for the exact same thing. 

In case you haven't figured it out by now, bottled water is a scam. These companies sell you what you could get for free (or virtually free from your own tap), while adding obscene amounts of pollution to the world. That garbage mass the size of Texas out in the Pacific Ocean — a lot of that is discarded water bottles. And why is it that when considering the size of a garbage mass, Texas immediately comes to mind? But hey, at least nobody's getting cooties from that nasty old drinking fountain, right?

Companies that produce bottled water make ridiculous amounts of money by stealing that water from beneath communities and then selling it for profits that would bring a profound sense of shame to any human being with a soul. Meanwhile, people buy into it all because of what may very well have been a concerted effort to convince hapless consumers that bottled water makes drinking fountains seem gross by comparison. 

Pictured: not a drinking fountain.

In West Michigan, a Nestlé plant that produces Ice Mountain bottled water pays $200 per year for a permit to draw 218 gallons per minute out of the aquifer that feeds the Newaygo River, and they have applied to increase that to 400 gallons per minute. That's enough to fill two king-sized waterbeds, if you happen to be reading this in the 1980s.

And I did the math... because despite what anybody tells you, math actually is kind of cool. At 218 gallons per minute, that works out to 114,580,800 gallons of water every year. 

But wait, there’s more... 

This means that for every dollar that the Swiss corporation Nestlé pays to the State of Michigan, they are getting 572,904 gallons of potable water. This also means that the content of a single 16 oz bottle of Ice Mountain sold for $1 has seen a markup of over 458 million percent. Wrap your head around that. I'm no business major, but that seems like a pretty good profit margin, even after you factor in production costs, marketing and distribution. And now Nestlé wants to increase the amount of water that they pump out of the ground to about 210 million gallons per year, which would nearly double these already absurd profits. You’d think that these assholes could at least afford to make biodegradable bottles with all that extra money. 

You might also think that people would stand up to companies like this who are effectively stealing local resources out from under their feet and then sending all of the profits back to a soulless corporate entity, which in this case happens to be in Switzerland, a country best known for utility knives, hot chocolate and shady banking practices. Actually, some people are standing up, and here is a petition you can sign to support their cause. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the only American state to be surrounded by fresh water on three sides, the residents of Flint had unwittingly been paying their city to deliver deadly toxins to their homes for years, with the average resident there still paying more annually than Nestlé does for almost 115 million gallons of clean water. I welcome anyone to explain to me how that's not fucked up.

Now we have a cannabalistic executive branch that wants to do away with regulatory agencies such as the EPA that help keep our water safe. This administration will betray the public trust at any given opportunity, all while pitching the extraordinary lie that any of these policy decisions are intended to save taxpayers money. Privatization of our government will eventually cost us our government and the nation it binds together.

Idiocracy wasn't wrong, but it may have been off by about 500 years.

But maybe you think that defunding our regulatory agencies and selling off public utilities to be managed by the "free market" is a good thing. First of all, let me congratulate you for reading this far. Sorry if I used too many big words. You know what? Let's do some more story problems... Suppose you live in a town with 50,000 taxpayers living in it. If each of those individuals was to pay a dollar per month in taxes, which is less than the average cost of a single bottle of water, that would generate $600,000 per year, which would be more than enough to ensure inexpensive access to potable water for all of the people who live there. 

If people stopped buying bottled water altogether and just paid slightly higher taxes so that everyone has access to clean public drinking water, it would cost us all considerably less, and that's not even factoring in the health care expenses incurred from the sustained ingestion of carcinogens and other nasty shit if we continue down this path. Personally, I'm a fan of cheap, clean, publicly-owned utilities, but I've probably just been brainwashed by communist propaganda at some point or another. I did go to college, after all.

Clean water is a fundamental right of all living things. Don't let transnational corporations steal it from under you or convince yourself that there's so much water down there that these ground springs will never run dry. When they do, the companies will simply relocate, and the people who live there will have no choice but to go to the store and buy the water that they need at whatever price these companies want to charge for it.

Then they'll go back home and tell their grandkids about the good old days of drinking fountains. The grandchildren, in turn, will likely think that they're full of shit... just like all of the contaminated lakes and rivers in which they never learned to swim.