Abraham Lincoln’s quote keeps becoming more meaningful:

“Nothing is more damaging to you than to do something that you believe is wrong.”

As long as we do something we know is wrong, we will do whatever it takes to avoid confronting our internal conflict. We will suppress, deny, and lie to maintain our false ignorance. He didn’t say it’s bad. He said it’s the most damaging thing you can do to yourself. He saw what happens when half a nation does something it knows is wrong. We all pollute. We are seeing what happens when everyone does something we know hurts people, generally for our comfort and convenience.

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Every day, everywhere, people walk with disposable coffee cups, as if they didn’t add up to quadrillions:

In Montgomery they walked for a year in even in hundred-degree (F) weather. Nelson Mandela endured 27 years in prison. Gandhi marched to the sea. But people today can’t help getting coffee in plastic containers or waiting thirty minutes to get water from a tap to avoid finding the fossil fuel plastic industry.

Everyone has his or her bullshit excuse for it: it’s not their fault, they don’t have time, blah blah blah. Poor little helpless people. If only there was a way they could bring a mug, wait to get coffee later, or skip it. Sadly, they are powerless to stop themselves from paying several dollars for something they don’t need, to consume in a way detracting from the flavor. If only not buying coffee was as easy as splitting atoms or sending rockets to Mars, which people seem perfectly happy with.

Luckily, the people living near the landfills or from where the resources were extracted, displaced from their land, don’t matter. If they did, the poor coffee drinkers could think about others they hurt.

I suggest that the convenience is not worth everyone living in that waste. Here’s a mountain of trash in India taller than the Taj Mahal from the movie The Story of Plastic. The system creating it was funded by people paying for packaging:

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