It was around 1 a.m. (or 01:00 as I prefer to reference it, I actually hate the 12-hour clock and the way it is the accepted default) and I heard a truck go by down my street. My street is a residential street. Even if it was not, hearing a truck go by at that time is unusual.
What kind of truck could it be? What kind of truck would it be going down the street, this street in fact, at 1 a.m.?
The sound of the truck was similar to the waste disposal trucks which I usually hear later, around 5 or 6. This truck didn’t stop. It kept going. The other trucks, later, stop and I hear them although they are usually not that loud.
When I heard the 1 a.m. truck this morning it made me think: It activated in me a whole line of understanding about waste disposal service in the city, how it operates, the way waste is generated residentially, commercially, and industrially, and how society as a whole thinks about its activites and what comprises that which gets designated as waste (even recycling).
It made me think of how society thinks about the entire logistical orientation around what is designated as waste, and what society thinks it means to implement a logistical orientation that takes into account that which is considered waste and how it is handled.
One way of thinking about the logistics of the disposal of waste reminds me of the phrase “The city never sleeps”. Or maybe the phrase is actually “The city that never sleeps.” Something like that, but the general idea is of a place – a city – which is busy. It is a place where there is always action, activity. It never sleeps because it never has time to, because there’s always something important going on at every time, and every time is used fully to fulfill its purpose to facilitate the whole.
But is this way of thinking right? Where do humans get to feel justified that they can think this way and be right? Who made it right? What justifies this thinking – more than thinking – an attitude – more than an attitude: an implicit world view which is mostly transmitted amoung humans unspokenly and thus gets passed along, gets inherited from one generation to the next. But this process and this unspoken assumption, this implict worldview which drives the beliefs and feelings of justification is never announced. And in that process something human is lost.
When we look outside for some type of reference about what it means to be an active being, such as a human being, in the world, living on Earth, being healthy and happy, having fulfilled lives, living in some kind of balance and harmony with an existing world which we didn’t create – which world includes our very own bodies which we are now in danger of losing – we can get clues as to what is indeed a way that might be a way for humans to live as as fulfilled, healthy, and happy beings.
But mostly humans don’t look for those clues. It finds the clues as incidental, but doesn’t understand even what it is looking at. It puts a scope up to the world and sees back what is already predetermined by its disposition which is unannounced. So sciences tell us about health, about the body, about physiology, ecology, etc. but never understand who humans really are because this can’t be revealed through such means of looking.
There is no understanding of the understanding of the looking and hence what is seen is not real. The world rushes on, and the city never sleeps, and humans deprive their lives of the wholesomeness, health, and happiness that beings on this planet deserve because it has lost sight of what human being is.
What is it that a human being does that there is this thing created that is considered waste? Who said that it should be that way? Why isn’t this challenged? Why isn’t there a way that this is challenged, to ensure that humans haven’t just fallen asleep, have fallen into a drone state of simply replicating what is not even understood, even as it destroys?
I mentioned before how the truck made me think about the logistical operation surrounding waste disposal, but it made me think of more even. Because the logistical operation of waste disposal dovetails with many other things.
The reason that waste disposal trucks are roaming the streets at ungodly hours of the day is because at other times of the day the streets are congested with traffic from other vehicles. So there is even this factor to consider: Why are the streets congested at other times? What gives people the right to justify the use of fossil fuels and the operation of mind-bogglingly resource-consumptive machines for the sake of what gets called transportation?
What is this transportation and why does it take place? Again, there is a whole range of assumptions and implicit beliefs, founded upon an unspoken worldview, about what it is fundamentally that people are doing. And its funny how almost all of what it is that is being done is, again, stuff that is inherited. It is the Nth iteration of a replicating process which goes back, back in time.
But the context is now totally different. The reasons behind things have shifted. The entire world has changed in a revolutionary way. Yet socieity sputters along with these old ideas which are governing principles about how and why people do things.
Honestly, not much of it makes sense. All sense is lost when a fundamental essence of humanity becomes submerged and the unannounced, unspoken setting-upon which alters the very reality of the world before our eyes becomes dominant.
How can this ever be overturned? I only see one way forward, and that is to start respecting fundamental human rights. There are too many layers of the self-replicating dispostion which projects and sees back its own distortion of reality that it can ever achieve perspicacity through itself. What it needs to do is value human rights – in fact the rights of all living beings – fundamentally and work from there.
Life itself provides the clues humans need to find ways out of its darkness.
This is what I thought about when I heard the garbage truck go by at 1 a.m. I thought that I can have an amazing vision of a very different city, but that vision is not going anywhere so long as there not a place fundamental rights of living beings.
I thought of a different world. In that world there is no garbage. In that world the activities of human beings are mindful and taken with the utmost care. There is no comportment towards reality which even involves the implicit ideas that surround not only waste, but everything it is that we think we need and want, and where we think we are going and want to go.
In that world people still consume things. There are still products. But the way a human uses anything is different. Nothing is just taken, and there’s no implicit justification to simply impose thoughtlessly without being conscientious and considerate to the highest degree.
In that world the city, and all life sleeps, because sleep is replenishing. There are no silly ideas being perpetuated and replicated based on arrogant self-righteous justifications about what we think is important, because in that world we understand what really is important.
In that world, instead of something that is pushed to the shadows, out of the way, the process of “waste” disposal is at the center of the day because the use and reuse of things we consume is part and parcel of the core of our existence that we care about, something that all humans pay heed to.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.