The Seventh Look

 I wrote this post yesterday after a slow walk in the park where we saw another discarded facemask in the grass. What sort of person wears a mask to keep us all safe and then leaves it on the ground in a public park? 

Later I took another look at what I had written in a righteous tantrum and pitched my purple prose (metaphorically) in the basket (a hard drive on the blog server). This version is about how taking another look can change your mind. Let me demonstrate.

Walking in the park yesterday would have been quite delightful if I had paid attention to kids who were making happy noise in the playground. But I was ruminating on what was here a thousand years ago compared to a present day in which some people will drop a facemask wherever they take it off, portent of a future buried in accumulating rubbish. Dorothy was noticing the here and now. She told me she saw one boy hug a garbage bin saying, "this is my favourite garbage pail." He was obviously ecstatic about everything because he was once more playing with friends after months of pandemic lockdown, and his world was wonderful, including the garbage bin.

Some people think differently about garbage. On one of our walks before pandemic, we spoke to a family from Texas visiting neighbours. The husband was ranting about Guelph's system of presorting garbage into green, blue and grey bins. "We would never put up with that in Texas. Nobody tells me what to do with my trash. Trash is trash. Period." I imagined him drawing his guns to defend his God-given right to dispose of trash however he liked. I expect that sometime in the next thousand years, before being buried in trash, Texans will take another look and change their minds.

Buried in trash sounds like an exaggeration. It isn't. Last night's national news reported the shoreline cleanup in British Columbia, hundreds of tons of plastic trash removed by helicopters at a cost of millions of dollars. In some places, it has broken down into plastic pebbles piled up a metre deep. More is coming all over the world by the millions of tons per year.

For the last few generations, we have been extracting materials and manufacturing short-lived products for profit as if it could continue forever. Along the way, facemasks, refrigerators, bottles, fishnets, bags, blog posts on hard drives, and such are useful for a few minutes or a few years, and then discarded to persist for centuries as rubbish. As it piles up, we cannot avoid the seventh look. We will change our minds about trash before the playground disappears beneath it. Sooner or later, trash will be too valuable to throw away. Sooner would be good.  Until then, we should embrace the garbage bin and keep our heads above trash.

That's what I saw in the seventh look.