I've heard that Americans throw away enough garbage every day to fill 63,000 garbage trucks, which if lined up end to end for an entire year would stretch half way to the moon. I won't be surprised if some day we try that.
People sometimes get their jollies at ridiculing hoarders, making shows and writing books on how to fix those broken folks. It occurs to me that while hoarders might be a problem to themselves, their families, and their neighbors, they are mostly a symptom of a great imbalance. They are trying to solve a perplexing question with a Sisyphusian task.
How can we continually throw away such wealth? It seems that no matter how much junk a hoarder can "adopt", there is always more. Well, who will take care of it?
Of course it is just too much for one person to handle.
Who is crushed by the responsability of knowing that there is still value in these things that are so casually tossed.
Perhaps "how?" is the wrong question.
Maybe the question should be "WHY do we throw away so much?"
What forces conspire to make this seem inevitable and right?
It's not just stuff. It's the earth. It's wood. It's oil that took millions of years to make and only looks cheap. It's our sewage. It's people too. The ones we can't figure out what to do with. It's our past, our future, our present. The parts of us we'd rather bury. What we throw away is everything we don't pay attention to.
What shall we make of it all? Shall we make a highway to the moon for 63,000 trucks?
Or shall we invest ourselves into making choices that deeply move us?
Shall we create a world that is elegant on so many levels that we need less and we treat everything we have as precious.