Have you noticed that sanitation departments have become socialist, imperialist, and flagrant violators of the US Constitution’s original intent?
Once, all garbage biodegraded. All garbage would turn into food for something within time scales relevant to human lives.
Not today. Plastic can take centuries to degrade, during which time they kill wildlife and poison us. Plenty of residue from our culture poisons more, like pesticides and home cleaning products.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors could just drop the parts of the fruit, vegetable, or animal they didn’t want to eat on the ground and between the benign content of that part and the accommodating population density, their disposal caused no problems.
At some point after we formed cities, we shifted to having others haul our trash away to put in big holes in the ground. The stuff might take longer to degrade, but it was farther away so we didn’t have to worry about it. If everyone paid for the service out of their taxes, it seems we created a socialized service.
People lost the incentive to minimize our waste. Landfills grew. We moved them farther away.
When waste became toxic, we moved them more than farther. We moved them abroad. Taking others’ land is imperialism. In other words, we’ve turned sanitation into a socialist, imperialist, poisonous pattern giving individuals claims to plausible deniability. Those claims are false, but since everyone uses them, no one challenges them back.
Sanitation departments reveal flagrant violations of the intent of the US Constitution, in particular that it included protecting you from my taking or destroying your life, liberty, or property without your consent. Pollution destroys life, liberty, and property, hence sanitation departments violate the intent of the Constitution.
To live by the Constitution, instead of sanitation departments hauling poisonous waste to other countries, a government that protects life, liberty, and property would have to prevent pollution (and depletion). We didn’t notice that we compromised our values in sliding into this socialist, imperialist, poisonous violation of the Constitution, but we did.
Here’s a pile of garbage from a park near me one day:
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