America has acclimatized to overwhelming garbage. It will increase until we change culture to restore the values we’ve jettisoned.

Yesterday, April 20th, is a big holiday for people who love cannabis and many cannabis lovers love Washington Square Park so it was more crowded than usual, but it’s not a national holiday or that big. Yet look at the garbage on a mostly regular day. I just took a few pictures, but every can was beyond full to overflowing. Each became the center of an ever-growing pile of garbage.

In the title I call the garbage overwhelming because its production is overwhelming every sanitation system in the world as well as all our landfills. It is overwhelming our culture. I would say it’s forcing us to accept it, but the point of this post and of my life is to invigorate and inspire you to realize you don’t have to contribute to it. You don’t have to buy almost any packaged food or doof, which causes nearly all this garbage. Quit with the excuses that not everyone has access, and all the other nonsense we tell ourselves to sleep at night like everyone else enjoying the perks from being at the top of a dominance hierarchy. That’s corruption: that is, people corrupted from living by their values talk that way. Plastic hurts people without their consent and we can just bring an apple or sandwich we made at home.

And I mean, every can. And the cans didn’t contain most of the garbage. Cannabis is a plant, which in principle could mean it could not pollute. In practice, there were dozens of vendors, maybe a hundred, and every one distributed more plastic than plant. Plastic jars, bags, laminated handouts, etc.

There was garbage everywhere. I have no problem with people consuming weed. I have no problem with vendors, though I thought the park was supposed to limit commercial activity. I don’t like amplified music in the park that people who don’t consent can’t avoid, but at least it doesn’t keep poisoning people and wildlife for centuries.

But My Main Point Is Culture

As much as I dislike the individual pieces of pollution that hurts people and wildlife, these pictures show our culture. We have become comfortable surrounded by toxic garbage, producing toxic garbage, paying for toxic garbage. New York has always had garbage, but it didn’t use to be mostly plastic, which poisons. The metal, paper, and glass that mostly made up garbage when I was here in the 1980s didn’t poison people.

My point isn’t weed either. I only had to mention it so that people saw it wasn’t just an ordinary day that produced this much garbage and couldn’t say we don’t normally create this much garbage. This amount isn’t much more than usual, though. And why should garbage resulting from a celebration get a pass?

How do we tolerate garbage saturating a celebration? Shouldn’t we live in a culture where garbage annoys us? Shouldn’t we say, “There’s a lot of garbage in the middle of our party. It should depress us. Let’s clean it up so we aren’t surrounded by garbage, then get back to celebrating without being mired in waste, taking care not to produce more.”?

The Values We Jettisoned

What values have we jettisoned?

As I wrote in my post Our Deepest Values: “Do, Leave, Live, Love”,

The values are expressed in instructions:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Live and Let Live.

Leave it better than you found it.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

In personal interactions, we often still live by them, but when our impact on others is mediated through the environment, we have largely abandoned them. For example, if someone wants takeout to bring to the park, almost nobody concerns themselves with the garbage produced, the people who would be displaced from their land and made refugees to access minerals and fuels beneath them to produce it, with those who will eat, drink, and breathe the resulting pollution, or with the cultures homogenized and assimilated. We only ask if we have the time and money. Polluting and depleting violate those values. I am working to restore them.

Here are more pictures of garbage. The bottom on is on Sixth Avenue, a block and a half away from the park. I don’t know if that garbage was related, but does it matter?