A Meditation on Garbage…and Beyond

Questions are more important than answers. 

Questions open the way to new realizations, solutions and creations.  Whereas answers, though sought as a means to a desired end, tend to be more of a shutting down, finishing it kind of energy.  There.  You have an answer.  Now you can stop seeking.  You can stay put.

It’s possible to find out all kinds of things about a person by rummaging through their garbage. In this meditation on garbage, and beyond, I thought we could rummage through the garbage of society, at large.  See what we can find out about it.  So, I’ve put together some clusters of questions, along with the thoughts they sparked, in order to … you know … help save the planet. 

What if you had no garbage pick-up? 
What would that look like? 
How would you deal with your own garbage?

On a sphere, everything comes back around.  There is no such thing as throwing something away.  There is no “away.”  Yet every day, everybody throws stuff out.  Repeatedly.  Single use plastics and planned obsolescence have become the norm.  That styrofoam cup you responsibly drop in the bin, after drinking one cup of coffee, could be around for up to a million years, depending on environmental conditions. “Disposable” diapers, menstrual and incontinence pads take 500 years to break down.   Foil pans take 400 years.  While paper cups only take 20 years.

20 years? That cup of fruit punch at your nephew’s birthday party is worth 20 years?

That dollar you spent at McDonald’s trashed a whole acre of rainforest? Really? Would you like a glacier with that? For dessert?

Are you OK with this?

Plastic production has increased twentyfold over the last fifty years. 

• only 5% of plastic is recycled properly
• 40% of plastic ends up in a landfills
• the rest ends up in fragile ecosystems, like oceans

250,000 tons of plastic garbage are adrift in our oceans, with 8 million more tons being added every year.  This is the equivalent of a full garbage truck being emptied into the ocean…

EVERY. SINGLE. MINUTE. 

And it probably takes close to a minute for a garbage truck to completely empty its load. So, it’s non-stop. 365/24/7. The way things are going, this will increase to TWO garbage trucks full, per minute by the year 2030. And by 2050, it’ll be up to FOUR full garbage trucks dumping their loads into the ocean, every single minute, of every single day.  

This is insane.

What is the source of this insanity?
What kind of people produce so much garbage?
What’s wrong with them?

It’s a bizarre, made-up value judgement system that stands on a long series of shoulders, over a long period of time.

Ecologically conscious companies are now producing biodegradable plastics, which is nice.  But it’s a band-aid (another disposable) and does not address the underlying source of the disposability mentality.  Even if every single manufacturing plant in the whole wide world switched to using only biodegradable plastics, for whatever it is they make and distribute, it would not solve the underlying problem.  While it would, presumably, be somewhat less detrimental to the environment, it’s not a solution. 

The problems created by over-engineering and over-production cannot be solved with more engineering, more production.  That’s where these ecologically conscious companies are getting it wrong.  You can’t solve problems using the same mindset that created those problems, in the first place.

The attitude that we can have, literally, every little whim gratified, every minute, on demand and shouldn’t have to care about the consequences, that we can just toss barely used things out because we want the next shiny object presenting itself on our facebook feed, will not go away because disposable diapers can be made to degrade quickly.  If anything, it will create an even bigger elitism gap.  Being able to afford these fancy biodegradables becomes one more artificially created demonstration of our superiority, giving us the ability to look down on the trailer trash buying the cheap, non-eco diapers.

That’s what it comes down to.  Superiority. A desperate need to feel important, to feel better than everybody else, as a way to mask and over-compensate for deep-seated feelings of inferiority. 

In a culture based on absurdities like “Original Sin,” and other equally horrible variations detailing why we’re not good enough, will never be good enough, no matter what we do, it’s easy to market the idea of buying our goodness. And if we can buy our goodness, we can, and do, become frantic about it.  But it doesn’t work. It can’t. Our goodness was supposed to come from within, not from outside stuff. So, like with heroine addicts, the need keeps increasing. The powers that be love this. It’s a very profitable vein, and they’ve been mining it for years.

 

What if humans realized they’re not superior?
To other animals…?
To each other…?
To the planet we live on…?

How would that change things?

 

In a domination culture, everybody suffers from multi-generational trauma. It is both normalized and expressed in myriad ways, so is hidden in plain sight. Invisible, for all practical purposes.

The trifecta of war/rape/slavery that’s been so arrogantly imposed on the lives of every single ethnic group, since it began in the Bronze Age, has negatively impacted everybody. “Winners” and “losers” alike. For there are no winners. When the freedom, dignity and labor of one group is usurped by another group, ideas of deservability, as well as irrelevance and disposability become the logical progression. And this progression solidifies into long standing “traditions.” The reality is, it creates monsters. That’s what the “winners” get — the ability to become monsters, and the right to pass their monstrosity down to the next generation.

Nobody likes a straw boss.

But, being able to legally dispose of (have killed) a slave who made a mistake is certainly not the same as simply disposing of an empty plastic water bottle. Is it? No. It’s not. But it’s on the same spectrum. It’s the same mentality.

The false notion of supremacy is the source of the disposability mindset.

Which people are the most important?
Do people living in poverty count?
Is violence justifiable?
Who gets to decide?
And what does that make them?

 We humans have a strange way of attaching emotional importance to things. This ratty old sweater belonged to my beloved dead brother. It still has his smell. I must keep it forever. Things are like external hard drives for us, storing memories in a way our brains cannot. They are like cemented, physicalized memories. I touched this rock while I was grieving for her, therefore this rock is her. I must keep it forever. And the rock and the ratty old sweater do, indeed, impart a sense of comfort when touched. Having transferred our feelings for the dearly departed into the object, we can almost feel them when we touch the object. It’s perfectly normal and healthy. And it genuinely is a comfort.

Hoarders take this attachment to an extreme.

Conversely, the throw-away mindset cannot see the value in anything. The universe is a dead, inert, mechanical thing. This planet exists for us to exploit and destroy in any way we like. Forests are for timber. Animals do not have souls and are irrelevant. Landfills are important. It’s just garbage, who cares? When somebody hurts us we hurt them back and/or get rid of them…

Obviously, most individuals to not function in either extreme, either the hoarder or the total nature-hating, nihilistic throw-away type. But these extremes are mirror images of each other, the energies of each shifting, bi-directionally between them, back and forth, tainting everything in the middle ground. All points in between. The culture at large, that we were all born into, is definitely a disposable culture. Being social animals, we carry our culture within us. It’s bred in the bone. It fills the spaces between our atoms. Whether we like it or not. It has an effect on our thoughts, beliefs and actions. And most of it is unconscious, automatic.

With our natural penchant for attaching emotions to things, can we reverse engineer the attitude behind this massive throw-away lifestyle? When mountains and mountains of single-use disposable objects are tossed dismissively aside, non-stop, as a way of life, by everybody, what effect does that have on our emotions? And, by extension, our relationships?

It’s all subliminal, subconscious. Which makes it worse. Being so well hidden, under multiple layers of rationality to protect us from seeing anything but our most pressing day-to-day demands, we go on about our days oblivious to what’s being played out.

Building and maintaining healthy relationships takes time, patience, dedication…the exact opposite of the throwaway world.

For social animals, we’ve become frighteningly anti-social. Sociopaths shooting schoolkids has become a commonplace occurrence. This is, of course, an extreme tip of a very big iceberg. But it speaks to disturbing and systemic changes in the mainstream of society.

Would this be possible if we had a collective understanding that nobody and nothing is disposable? Could a society that believed cutting down a healthy tree was an abomination ever produce sociopaths? Because it’s not only the tree, but the animals who live in the tree. Could a society that cared about these creatures inflict this kind of harm on its own young? Or see anybody as unworthy, irrelevant or disposable? It’s all connected.

The visibly horrifying changes in society, the increasing violence and narcissism, the increased lack of empathy are not changes as much as they are magnifications. These things are built into a dominator culture. War Cultures need a war-minded populace. At least a certain percentage of the population has to be onboard with it, for it to continue. And more than enough are. They refer to it as their “Greatness.” Sociopaths shooting schoolkids are part of the collective insanity coming to a head. All the rapidly developing technologies are magnifying it, bringing it up to the surface. It’s not just the shooters who are the culprits. All of us are. Unwittingly, and not on purpose. But we buy into it. In droves.

Most of us are not manufacturing magnates. Yet it’s easy to see how disposable junk goes hand in hand with mass production. How much faster it makes everything. And faster production means lower prices and higher profits. Everybody wins. Except, everybody loses.

In Conclusion

I’ll end with one more question.

How can our Gross National Product be…Garbage?

This was depressing, I know. But it’s important. Things have gotten so far out of hand, it seems impossible to fix. The insanity has saturated every level of our existence. Challenging even one of humanity’s sacred cows, to the point of causing a significant shift, is a Herculean task. But challenging all of them? Simultaneously?