Lugubrious Laments on Littering

There are many facets of life both on Earth that I will never understand: it will never be completely clear to me why there is war, how humans can do such atrocities to each other, to themselves; I’ll never comprehend the forces tugging people to fit into certain parts of society, preformed niches and unnatural groups; I’ll never come to terms with the infinitesimally brief blip on the universal timeline that is humanity, let alone my own existence; and, I’ll never understand the people who blemish the beautiful place that they’ve rather miraculously found themselves alive on. Yes, this is going to be a somniferous inchoate diatribe concerning, so you’ve been warned.

Trash offends my eye. Well, both eyes, but often I’m so bloody angry I end up squinting at the rubbish in pirate-esque, villainous fashion. It’s vile, filthy, fetid, unnatural, bilious, bile-inducing, nauseatingly supercilious in its human arrogance, so utterly contemptible that it makes me feel sicker than the equally revolting contents of the ubiquitous fast-food containers and vending-machine discharge that are so sadly slathered over our campus-grounds. It makes me ashamed, to be frank, to be human, when I see that someone has seen fit to act so carelessly, or rather, not seen that their actions are bereft of true humanity. The wonderful human Carl Sagan said something along the lines of “The Earth is not a gift from the past, but instead a loan from the future”. Pretend, for a second, that you are blithely walking down your quotidian route, when you notice a dorm to one of those houses, the kind that you’ve always wanted to sneak into to explore the insides. In a fit of daring, you slip through the front door and begin to roam around, through its multiple doors and floors, over its furniture, under the tables and artifacts, around the various utensils and paraphernalia of the house—and the more you wander, the more comfortable you feel, and the more comfortable the feel the less carefully you wander—and the cycle wooshes around until you’ve somehow managed to deplete the refrigerator /and/ larders, trash the living room, and break every other electrical appliance, as well as a few works of art. Then, to your utter shame, the door creaks open, and the surprised face of the house owner enters his home turned rubbish-pit. Would you, the romping interloper, feel some moral twinge, some shame? Guilt, perhaps, given that those affected confront you?

An imperfect metaphor, I know, the main issue being the perception of time—how many, er, times have you heard the phrase, “It’ll happen to some other person far off in the future, not me or my immediate kin, so why bother worrying about it?”. The stranger whose house we have destroyed is often many years down the line in the chronology of humanity; they are not your son, your daughter, your relations, your friends, your beloved. And yet, while most humans (myself readily included) have narrow visions of the Earth they live on, oftentimes due to this limited timeframe, they neglect the net effect of their actions, the net effect of the various wastes and ways of their wayward kind. Nuclear radiation is an unfortunate exception to the rule, an exception that fortunately does turn heads—the horrors and effects of the damage can be seen within our minute life-spans (though the full totality of the environmental damage from these different disasters, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Bhopal, and now Japan again, has yet to be surmised). It’s a charred blessing, a kick in the rear, a reminder of the devastation we can wreak upon each other.

Littering produces no such immediate effect. The trash sits there, rustling forlornly in the wind, drawing the attention of foraging animals and misguidedly philanthropic teens. I’m sure that studies have been done and scare-tactics employed to empirically prove how disastrous littering is environmentally. Again, though, these long range projections fail to impress their full weight upon my blinkered mind, so limited and with limited time. No, the worst component of littering, in my eyes, is the facility with which it can be avoided and remedied, and yet— it still exists. It’s not terribly difficult, really, to find some trash receptacle or recycling bin; if need be, one can pocket or retain the trash until an appropriate trash burial site arises. Easy, you’d think, but the ground, whether it be the campus quad, or the school garden, or the cracking suburban sidewalks, is a testament to the reality of the omnipresent problem. The mere fact that litter exists is indicative of an unsettling human mindset.

The question remains as to what one should do about such a prevalent issue. Ideally, society would ingrain the importance of human-environment symbiosis (if not agreeable tolerance) from an early age, and the problem would vanish with the inculcation of the upcoming generations. More realistically, the palliative, retroactive cure of trash-removal is a doable option. To me, the site of a gum wrapper or discarded burger wrapper is so discordant with the lush grass and blooming flora that I’ll often stoop to remove the offending object. However, once one begins picking up trash, the sequential question of when to stop poses a bit of a problem, due to the surfeit of the material. Should one pick up a certain amount per day, or instead whatever amount one fancies? When it’s merely a matter of convenience, along a preplanned route, or wherever and however one can? How much help should one put forward? Rationally, we must put a limit on our activities and actions… but when one is struggling against problems that never will be resolved (in this manner, that is), the quantity of help is hard to deduce, and we note that this conundrum extends to more than just garbage-disposal. How much help is enough? How should one ascertain that they are even “helping”, anyway? For all I know, the trash I throw into the trashcan is dumped somewhere even less preferable than the original place from which I removed the junk; it’s very hypocritical of me, I suppose, to blindly feel like I’m doing some negligible form of good by simply taking trash from the ground and placing it into designated areas, if the full lifecycle of garbage is eclipsed by my ignorance.

Presently, I whimsically stoop to remove trash when my time is ample and my hands are free to do so, knowing full well that this small altruistic act costs me nearly nothing and probably garners nothing in return. Still, it pleases me, to remove some unnatural blemish from splotches of land I find beautiful. One day, perhaps, I'll have no more trash to collect; perhaps a more environmentally friendly ethos will arise in a society; perhaps all usable materials will become biodegradable and suitable to be tossed onto the ground; perhaps robots will zip around, cleaning up after us; and perhaps, one day, we’ll look back and wish that we had just one more day to fix the compounding errors of our misguided ways.

Brief Message (not 7th and final post)

The directive of our final assignment: to write in monosyllabic prose or omit all adjectives. I tried, temporarily, but monosyllabic prose seems to lend itself to melodramatic, useless poems. The challenge was too much for my feeble and senioritis encumbered mind. For example, here rots an excerpt of a rather badly formulated monosyllabic sonnet—

“Who’s there, quail I, eyes wide with fright,
Why d’ost thought turn my head so bent
With words of hope on my school night.
When work drains all and time is rent?

Ah, clucked it (as I could not tell
If this odd lilt was man or gal)
“Your plight calls not for self-thought hell,
Why not, with time, give this your all?”

Etc, etc, shudder no more, I’m not going to put myself or any unfortunate reader through any such rubbish; instead, a normal post will follow this. Directive: failed. Author: demised, despised, resides somewhere between Tripoli and Indiana, perhaps in a corn field.