So I've been watching Mad Men on Netflix. I'm on Season 2, and there's a scene where the Draper family has a picnic and leaves all of their trash behind. It's a metaphor for all of the trash in their lives that they aren't willing to deal with; they're just leaving it for other people to clean up.
Cleaning up, or dealing with, your own garbage is a time-consuming and thankless task. All one gets is perhaps a self-directed pat on the back. Sometimes only you know what you've done. The greenbelt in front of my house is a full-time promenade for the neighborhood. It's always packed with groups of people and children, especially after school.
On a walk last night with the dogs, I noticed that there was trash everywhere. The riding lawnmower had been through, and made lots of big pieces into many more little pieces; it wasn't pretty. I didn't know how to handle it. Do I pick up other people's garbage to set an example? Do I ignore it because it isn't my problem? I thought about making signs that say "Respect the Greenbelt". It seemed like a communal message, "Let's take care of our shared space". But I know that I very rarely, if ever, am able to get someone to do what I think is right, so maybe I'll just hold off on the sign-making for right now.
Sometimes I wish I could throw my messes on someone else's doorstep. But I don't. "Why not?", you ask. Because I wouldn't go shit on someone's doorstep just to make them smell it. If it isn't productive, I don't need to whip it out and throw it around. That just causes more pain for everyone. There is no deserve. No one deserves pain. We all just kind of deal with it in the best way we can, and hopefully, along the way, we won't cause more of it.
Hopefully.
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