Garbage Men

If is funny.  I talk about political subjects all the time.  I was a political science major in college.  People think I enjoy talking about politics.  I'm going to share a little secret with you.


I hate it.


I talk about politics for a variety of reasons that I perhaps don't even fully understand.  There is a mix of narcissism, "Hey you are doing it wrong!".  There is a mix of contempt, "How could you be so stupid! (I try to hide this one)".  There is a lot of sadness and frustration, "F**k!!!".  There is amazement, "Wow, this is really happening." There is discovery, "Ah, so that is where this originated from." But there is very little joy.  I am a garbage man.  I find garbage, and try to get society to admit to owning it, so that it can be cleaned up.  But society isn't interested.  The problems grow and fester, no one is there to solve them.  So me and my fellow sanitation engineers huddle together in society's filth.

Eventually I'll stop.  I'll grow weary. Too much dirt will rub off on me. I'll see the pointlessness of it.  I'll stop striving. They don't want to clean up their trash.  Eventually I and people like me's lights will dim.  Just mountains of societal trash pushed into the corners as a decadent and declining society wallows in it's filth, to proud or too busy to own their garbage, get dirty, and clean.

Yet I feel compelled to keep finding garbage and dumping it on the owners steps. "This is yours."  They ignore me or say it is belongs to someone else. Even worse, sometimes they ask, "Who are yo to tell us that this is our garbage? Who made you a garbage man? You are just...you. You don't know any more than we do. You don't have any authority to claim this garbage belongs to anybody."  I don't debate this. I just keep pointing to the trash. "This is yours. It needs to be cleaned up."  I know soon they will start telling us garbage men to quit bringing the garbage near them, and if we do there will be hell to pay.

This will be a sad day.  A death of a dream. A death of a super power in my mind. Perhaps the death of a false idol as well.  Maybe this day will be freeing rather than saddening.

I did what I felt compelled to do.  The results are not in my hands.  Now it is time to move on to other things.

That day I think is coming soon.  It will be a good day for me, not a good day for the society that I loved.  But that society won't even notice or care, and I will move on.  I actually look forward to that day.