Day 393: Dirty Little Monkeys

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2352229/Glastonbury-2013-After-Britains-biggest-music-festival--great-clean-up.html

They came, they partied... and they left a whole lot of mess.

Britain's biggest music festival, which lasted five days, has been home to some 135,000 ticket holders - but from today, the clean up operation of Glastonbury Festival 2013 begins.

Revellers have been entertained by the likes of The Rolling Stones, Arctic Monkeys and Mumford & Sons during the festival, with celebrities including Prince Harry, Kate Moss and Wayne Rooney among festival goers.

The mission to convert the land back into a functioning dairy farm, a process which should take six weeks according to festival organisers, then begins in earnest.

Tractors carrying magnetic strips will travel across the 900-acre site to pick up tent pegs while workers will carry out a fingertip search to make sure no inch of the land goes unchecked. - Mail Online

It seems that we are simply incapable of controlling ourselves when it comes to leaving rubbish and various odds and ends all over the place. How much of our world is covered with rubbish? How much of our lifestyle is dependent on the idea that everything we own, we will eventually throw away?

So much of our lives revolve around short-lived things: computers being upgraded, cellphones becoming obsolete, weird gadgets that enjoy brief popularity and then plunge to the ever after, clothes that only last a couple of years (if you're lucky), cars that fall apart once the warranty lapses, plastic take away wrappers and cups, millions and millions of bags, boxes, ribbons, wrappers - all these things designed to only be usable for a limited time.

What has this ideology made of us? Shit machines. We buy and buy and buy, no longer even considering what happens with the things we buy once we're done with them. We have mountains of rubbish dumps. We have an ocean choking on rubbish. We don't have a viable solution for all of the trash we create. What the hell are we going to do with it all when there is no more space for land fills? Maybe our oceans will turn into toxic pits of rusting sharp edges - we are partway there already.

If we think of things in terms of disposability, then what will happen to the way we value other things, like people and animals? Already movies and TV shows depict the loss of human life in achieving some noble, yet irrational, goal as being acceptable. Seldom do the movies or TV shows depict the magnitude of even a single death: the pain felt by loved ones, the promise of what could be for someone cut short. If we start to view human (and animal) life as being disposable, then we open ourselves and our loved ones up to the consequences: other people treating us like we are worthless.

We are now simply pawns to be moved, unwilling to take direct action within our own lives, we leave that responsibility to those with more ambition. Unfortunately for us,  ambition is not a selfless condition - quite the opposite. We validate our lack of worth by living as if we have no value, as if life has no value.