The subject isn’t pretty. It isn’t new. And it’s always there. Garbage and more garbage, just piling up. I grew up down the street from a landfill, which sounds so much better than a hole in the ground where people dump their tons and tons of garbage.
Currently, I share recycle and garbage bins with my landlords. My landlords have a year old baby. They seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to put used baby diapers into the recycle bin because they are either too lazy to walk one foot to the garbage bin or somehow think that plastic baby diapers full of hazardous waste are recyclable. (I try not to dig too far into the psychology of my landlords because that’s a long and scary road.) I think about how their grandchildren, who hopefully won’t be born for another 25+ years, will be building their houses on piles of baby shit.
Their complete and total waste forces me think about garbage. It makes me think about how there are 6+ billion people on this planet and a heck of a lot of use were raised in plastic baby diapers. I wonder just how many people in Seattle are trying to recycle their babies’ diapers too. But it’s not just the plastic diapers. It’s the people and the consuming and the useless toxic waste. It’s that there are too many people on this planet, but everyone seems to feel entitled to pass along his/her DNA just because Tab A fits into Slot B or knowing how to use a turkey baster.
I know, I’m of the not having children, and if I do, there’s this thing called adoption, mindset. One of those plastic-baggie-washing self-righteous recycle and reuse freaks. I was 7-years-old and guilting my mother to use cloth diapers on my newborn youngest brother. I called her out again a few weekends with her love of paper plates.
I think about the company I work for and all the non-recyclable plastic packaging and the shipping and factory waste. I think about Wal-Marts and Urban Assault Vehicles (SUVs) and how no wonder the economies falling apart since most places seem to be run by college frat boys who majored in binge drinking. I drive myself nuts seeing broken down houses I’ll never be able to afford and front yards covered with invasive ivy and blackberries.
So I stop. I put on my blinders. I recycle my soy milk containers and turn off the lights. I stop listening to NPR for a week. I try to ignore the world that I can’t control and the people I can’t legal assault for trying to recycle baby shit. I leave an offering for Darwin and hope that the human race kills itself before it destroys Earth beyond repair.