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A Look Into Morals.
By Billy | October 7, 2011
I have strange but very poignant morals. I don’t understand my opinion, so I’m going to do what every good United Statesian does and be very vocal about it.
When I was in 5th grade, in Mrs. B’s class, I realized that if the entire human population were buried in a cemetery like everyone I’d ever known had planned on doing, eventually the world would become a huge cemetery. I literally had visions of the future where we build cities for the dead; gigantic skyscrapers just for stacks of dead people.
Which would make it exactly like all of Japan?
So it was that I then, as a ten year old, decided it was immoral for a person to be buried conventionally with a tombstone and a six thousand pound slab of concrete protecting your body from the dirt. I assumed cremation was the only remaining option, so it became my plan to be burned. [Now I want to be buried in a simple wooden box and have a Virginia Dogwood planted in the middle.] I mention all this simply to exemplify the fact that I’ve always had a sense of duty, or a moral compass, and perhaps a general disagreement with the status quo. [Mind you, this was the year when my teacher took me in the hall to ask me, “did you take your medicine?”, held my hands during church so I couldn’t play, and lobbied for me to double the amount of brain drugs I took. Do I hold that against her? A little…]
I don’t actually feel much like getting into my past involving militant veganism, in-your-face-ahimsa, or why I thought getting arrested a couple of times might be a good idea. I churned through those phases and am writing about now.
I throw my teabags in the garbage every day and I feel no guilt about it whatsoever. I feel guilty about pretty much everything (did I mention I was in a Catholic school in 5th grade?) but not about my tea bags. I learned at Bonnaroo a couple years ago that 25% of landfills are compostable, and I learned on a Ted.com talk that 25% of landfills are styrofoam. I’ve also heard that 25% of landfills are recyclable, so that leaves us with 25% of landfills being… what belongs in a landfill? Bonnaroo’s purpose for telling us to compost was so that landfills are filled more slowly, but frankly, I’d rather fill landfills up with… soil. Maybe we shouldn’t dig gigantic holes in the ground to throw stuff we don’t think is valuable anymore. [Couldn’t we employ people to take stuff apart and make it re-usable again?] So I throw my teabags in landfills because I’d be very happy if 100% of landfills was compostable. I actually don’t see any reason to NOT throw away compostable material if you’re not giving it directly to someone who is going to use it as soil. I kinda hope that all my teabags will help attract bacteria and worms and other crap that will someday evolve to eat the shitty styrofoam. I imagine my compostable material in a landfill is reclaiming the landfill from the noncompostable stuff we have there.
Before I drank my tea, I took a shower. I don’t shower but twice a week, but mainly because more than that makes me feel like I’m made of something synthetic. Day 2 or 3 feels just about perfect for me. But when I do shower, I really enjoy it. I turn the water up damn hot and I usually spend 20 minutes in the bathroom. I spend about 10-20% of my time actually making myself clean, and the rest of the time standing there and thinking, “I shouldn’t be wasting so much water. You know what, more water is wasted on watering front lawns in the US than showering, and even if I take a shorter shower, corporate America makes my change negligible. Why do I choose to feel empowered when it comes in handy to make me feel bad, but choose to feel unempowered when it comes to making me do something I’d like to do?” Good thoughts come of this, but that battle is most likely the black hole in the center of my thought galaxy. But in the end, I choose to stay there because enjoying a hot shower is not inherently evil. Heating water can be done in many sustainable ways, and if nothing else, shower water could be collected and turned into toilet flushing water so we don’t have to piss in drinking water, but if we as a society respected the cycle of resources on or planet more, showering could be done guiltlessly.
My morals are beginning to seem like they’re guided by what could be someday a moral decision, rather than what they are at the moment.
Huh. I’m outa steam and tired. Another dud post.
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