Social Decay

The heedlessly discarded.

I recently had the opportunity to travel across the country with my family (my wife and eight mouth old daughter, my wife’s sister, her husband and there three month old daughter and my mother and father-in-law). We traveled through several major cities at all times of the day and night, and crossed 1400 miles in 28 hours and my major take-way after all that… Our Society is crumbling.

I think we can all agree our society is crumbling. It’s write large across the face of our culture, our politics, our everyday interactions with strangers, in the gestalt of the internet zeitgeist. Everyone has their own problems with this country; things they would fix, institutions they would change, people they disagree with. Everyone has a problem with someone or something… The neighbor down the street who keeps sneaking trash into your can who has a Hillary 2016 bumper sticker. The gun totting idiot rebel who insists it’s their right to be able to carry an AR15 into Wal-mart to pick up a double case of Coors original and who you know then had to have voted for Trump. Maybe it’s not a person. Maybe you just know how things are supposed to be done, how to fix the economy, to end poverty, to cure racism. If only you were in charge everything would be better.

But what I saw on our trip was deeper than phatic statements turned vindictive and venomous, or the general turmoil that comes with any generational interplay. It hung on dead branches drifted in the wake of cars becoming crushed into pulp on the damp highway. It amplified the gray sky, it warped the color palette into tones of grim dark giving the impression of an apocalyptic waste land.

Trash infected everything.

Everywhere I looked white plastic drifted past, skeletal trees hung with the heedlessly discarded in a manic mockery of Christmas. Thoughtless or carless peoples junk turned the depressing into the Grim. One persons gum wrapper had become a cities dump yard, compounded and made stark until the only escape was flight. 75 mile an hour speed limits, loud music, phones that never shut off, a promise of greener grass just over the next hill.

So, we moved on city by city and nothing changed. Trash and junk were scattered about in almost equal measure filling yards and making them useless. Houses hid in hollows with chipped paint. Loss and uneven siding armored the crooked walls, roofs and gutters packed with dead leafs and sticks. Cars rusted in the driveway, set on blocks tires missing, hoods propped open with stick, headlights kicked out, windshields cracked or missing altogether. In short they were ugly.

So why does all this matter? The City didn’t do anything to me, I don’t live there, I’m not raising a family there, so why do I care? Why should you care that cities are trashed, or that people allowed them to get that way?

Beauty matters. Now before we can agree we need to define Beauty which is no easy thing.

If I ask ten people what the most beautiful thing they have ever seen is, you will get ten different answers. This doesn’t mean we can’t agree on what beauty is, everyone has their ideals, everyone has a past, a set bias they are working from, and a current affect that will effect their in the moment answers. However, we can agree in a general way on the border concept of beauty which I would define as: Aesthetics that generate positive affect. An easy way of telling if something is beautiful is do you want to look at it and does it make you happy? Pretty simple right?

If beauty generates positive affect, then it matters. Everything aesthetic has two possible values positive and negative, beauty and ugly. Let’s say you have a house, and it can either be beautiful or ugly, sure there is variation in those categories but it is one or the other. If beauty is Aesthetics that generate positive affect, then ugliness is Aesthetics that generate Negative Emotion. That’s it, things are one or the other and it effects you, warping your mood, for good or bad.

Beautiful and ugly things effect us. Just going for a walk and passing someones yard with junk everywhere, with paint chipping, siding missing, window coated in dust, roof half covered with stark blue tarp, a car on cinderblocks windshield shattered can change a beautiful day into a dark time. It doesn’t even have to be that messy, take two yards, one with patchy dead grass, and littered with fallen sticks, the other perfectly green, grass mowed, trees trimmed and not a loose stick in sight. One you might stop to admire, the other you would pass by without pause because you have seen ten thousand like it.

It’s not always even a conscious thing. You don’t walk down the street telling yourself ugly, pretty, ugly, pretty, ugly, pretty for everything you see, consciously categorizing your surroundings. For the most part it’s sub-consciences, it’s your brain doing what its deigned to; ignoring all the constant critical sensations and perceptions. You can't be aware of everything all the time, because our reality is to vast and complex for that. You have spent your entire life categorizing reality, ordering aspects of reality in there relation to other thing within reality, in relation to how they make you feel. This is why everyone is so different, we all have categorized reality in our own unique way because our histories are so diverse. This is why our definition of beauty is so broad. There’s no one work of art, no perfectly constructed sentences, no sequences of possibilities where you could get every single person to agree what is the most beautiful thing in this world.

My feelings on our trip of negativity began as a sub-consciences thing. It took time and some self examination of my feelings to discover the root. I wasn’t more irritated for no reason, I wasn’t feeling depressed because I had been trapped in a steel box for 18 hours. I had to shut off my brains autopilot and do some sifting and digging within my psyche to even begin understanding. My brain knew what it was doing with the trash all along. I didn’t discover anything new, all this was inside me the whole time I just had to realize it.

Now imagine your living in a trash filled city? It can do nothing but effect you. No one can see a white trash bag tumbling across the ground and say ‘my god that is so beautiful’. Trash (ugliness) drives the general mood down in an endless circular cycle, and the worst part is the whole city isn’t trashed, just the poorest parts, just the swaths where millions of people hurtle through. The part that needs beauty the most are the ones no one cares about. There the places where the people don’t have the money or time to waste on anything other than survival, or where the people in power think it’s to expensive to do anything about.

So, why are our cities trashed?

1: On our trip we ate out a lot, something me and my wife stay away from. We hopped our way from one restaurant to the next, picking up convenient, cheep food easily eaten in a car hurtling along bumpy roads at 75 miles an hour. We tore paper off food, ate, filled white bags with trash and stuffed them into island trash cans when we stopped for gas. Conveniency made everything ok. Eating unhealthy food, filling whatever cities landfill we were in at the time was an unnecessary waste. In fact it didn’t even cross my mind until we made it to our destination. We tell ourselves things like; ‘It’s only for a few days,’ ‘I’ll do better tomorrow,’ knowing we are doing something we shouldn’t, knowing there are better options. We could have packed more of our own food, even healthier with less waste. We could have skipped the trip all together reducing our carbon footprint.

We may not have tossed a bag of trash onto the freeway, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t part of the problem. Some of our unnecessary trash may have blown out of the back of a garbage truck. A trash bag might have torn when a gas station attendee was doing his job and got blown away by a rouge gust of wind. We don’t know what might happen, but we could have eliminated the possibilities by doing the “right thing”. I’m not saying anything we did was evil, wrong, despicable, abhorrent or morally corrupt. I am saying easy access, conveniency...it made everything acceptable. Where else in our lives does conveniency blind us to possible consequences? How often do we tell ourselves we’ll do better tomorrow and never do?

2: I grabbed a plastic wrapped toothpick on my way out of a disappointing meal. I held my wiggly daughter in my left arm. Rain sprinkled around us, lights shown in puddles, cars hummed by. I used my teeth to tear the plastic open, a clear scrap separating from the rest. I blow it out to vanish in the night. Why? I didn’t justify my acting in the moment. There was no conscious reasoning I used to make it ‘ok’. I just did it. Puff and gone. Later on in the car after I had to think about what I did, what was my response? Well it was my only option at the time, I was down one arm, I was trying to get my daughter out of the cold and rain, all of which were true but ultimately just excuses. Really, I think I told myself it’s only one piece of trash (at that point I had already had my thoughts on trash and been disgusted by it so I knew it was wrong). It was only one piece of trash, I didn’t throw out a tin can or empty foam cup it was just a clear plastic wrapper, in the grand scheme of things what did it matter?

It’s the slippery slope analogy. Do a thing once and it becomes easier to do it again. What you can justify once you can justify again. These actions will just snowball into your own face which makes the fact that every action has an equal and opposite reaction all the more important to remember. Reality is not passive. We live in a world with consequences big and small. Spitting out a quarter inch scrap of clear plastic is the definition of insignificant, or is it? If I did it once maybe, I could end up doing it again.

Also who cares if its just one piece? The size or the effect on the environment of litter shouldn’t matter and this applies to everything. How often do we tell ourselves it’s only one… one cigaret, one piece of gum you stole, only the one time cheating on your partner… once, one, once, who cares? IT is crazy how easily we can lie to ourselves. We lie to ourselves more that we lie to each other.

My point is it is unjust justification and if unchecked can lead to things you would never have done before.

3: Most people treat home and away very differently. You drive faster, waste more, treat people worse away and why? For one there’s less consequences. You will probably never see any of the people you interacted with ever again. Therefore, you have no social capital at stake. You don’t care if you blow through a small town with a 25 mile an hour speed limit. The people there will hate you but what do you care? What if you were just flying through a city of a million people, what if you saw trash flying by, houses run down, cars rusted and on blocks. How easy would it be to see those places as less? To look at a cup full of sunflower shells and just toss it out the window? You don’t live there, that trash doesn’t effect you, besides your car is cleaner now and theres no chance of you spilling. Your life seems better for it and you move on morally justified.

Conclusion

These three points require one thing from us to be able to justify them, dehumanization. Now, we don’t actually look at someone or do something immoral and justify it ourselves by saying they are less than me. No, it’s what our actions say, and we do this all the time. It becomes so repetitive that we don’t think about what are actions say, the effect they can have on others around us. Actions take way more energy than words and they don’t just effect us. You have no idea the kinds of ripple effects your actions can have for good or bad. We have to start thinking what our actions mean and how they can effect others. We have to think of consequences.