Wast-E

Yeah, that's kind of an easy title, but I decided to go with it. For those of you who got it early on (meaning you saw that lovable little movie I decided to riff on), I'll give you respite time to stop groaning at it. For those of you that didn't, well then here we go...

People are many things tangible and intantible; many shapes, many sizes, many personalities, many attitudes, many ambitions, etc etc etc. There's also something that many of us also tend to be: Wasteful pieces of shit.

Blunt and heavy-handed sure, but true. And I know this doesn't go for everyone, but I see this every day and it's terribly shocking to me, and if there's anything that anyone knows me to be, it's jaded towards the tendencies and attitudes of the people around me. It's rare that I'm surprised by what people do, but this is one of those things that I'm still kind of boggled by.

Those of you that don't know me from Adam should know this: I work in Hotel Catering. What this means is everyday I'm exposed to the consumption habits of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, whether it be from a business meeting with Coffee and Soda and so on all the way to Served dinners and the like. And man, the amount of shit we as people go through is staggering. And actually, the worst part of it is the amount of stuff that we don't go through. Let me elaborate.

For the past two days we've had a meeting summit for 200 people in our Ballroom. In the past two days I've seen consumption of at several hundred cans of soda and bottled water alone. Care to wager how many of those were even fully used? Care to wager how much of these consumables were opened for just a sip and left for refuse? It'd be a lot more than you'd think. Care to wonder where all this debris winds up since this unfortunately my property has only a scant recycling policy (cardboard only is all they've arranged for pick up sadly)? Yeah, that's right.

Even though our particular property doesn't have a recycling policy, well, I do. And I shit you not, me, just one little Shift Supervisor working barely in the outskirts of a decent sized "major city" collect and drop off somewhere in the realm of 60-70 pounds of plastic and aluminum to be recycled in a month. Let me repeat that: I myself drop off 70 POUNDS of material to be recycled in a month. That's half an average person. Shit, that's more than my 52" rear projection TV weighs. And like I said, this is just one little place in one little spec in all of the world. Don't even get me started on the amount of food gets tossed away during catered meals. It's disgusting in a way, especially when most days I come home to see a newsletter from WorldVision or whatever staring me in the face asking me if I have money for a donation this month (those bastards and their Ethiopian poster children. They always know how to get me).

Why do I bring all this up? Well, fuck, it should always be brought up. But one of the biggest and best movies of the year, Wall-E (see? it all comes around eventually) has taken a little bit of shit here and there about it's rather blatant message about the state of the world and litter. There's many little jabs and undertones throughout the movie, but this is the most projected. Hell, the whole premise of the movie is that the Earth was abandoned because it was too over-wrought with trash. Some people seem to think that such subject matter is a little to heady and overbearing for children and detracts from the fun for those that are old enough to actually question and wonder why people would do that. I think those people need to remove their heads out of their asses if it finally took a Pixar film to get people to take commentary on the kind of situation we're facing in the future if we don't start to watch ourselves and practice some more discretion.

I don't know if Global Warming is a real occurrence. I'd like to think we have enough scientific proof and measurements and a little something called "Cause and Effect" logic to make a case for it being a most likely scenario, but like the popular Anti-GW case likes to say "There's been warming periods before, this could just be another one". Sure, whatever. The basement's flooded, it could just be rain, but the fact that there's no clouds in the sky and that pipe in the corner looks busted would seem to argue otherwise, but still there's a chance, not going to dispute it. But one thing's for sure, we really just don't seem to pay attention to, or even really care about our crapulence.

In this fast food and Starbucks world, where it's so easy to just fill a corner trash can with plastic cups in the matter of an afternoon, day after day there just seems like there should be more action taken. I'm not sure what, obviously if I were a smarter man I'd be getting paid big bucks to sumise what measures should be taken, but it seems rather ridiculous to me that that trash bin doesn't also have a recycling one right next to it. It seems to me that people aren't exactly going out of their way to be wasteful or unconscientious, it's just that alternatives aren't particularly available to them. If helping to reduce garbage production was as easy as seeing a can on the corner to drop their cup or can in when finished, then I'm sure a lot more people would do it. But for some reason it's not, and that scares me, because if something as easily providable as public bins for paper, plastic, etc aren't being implimented, what the hell is actually being done?

I've been thinking of this more and more recently, I don't know why. I guess I just have this thing of mine, I don't really care how people remember me, or even to be remembered, but I just don't want to be thought back on as being an asshole. And if you ask me, kind of just going about your daily activities with kind of a disregard as to what your consumption - or not even consumption, because really I don't think something as simple as a burger wrapper in the trash because you had some convenient food is something to get up in arms about - but more the lack of a train of thought in the lines of "Maybe I should save all my beer cans for recycling instead of carrying three bags of them to the trash pickup every Tuesday night" is really kind of prickish y'know? I don't ever plan on having kids, but I don't want this group of youngins that just saw that adorable little robot grow up to realize "FUCK! The movie with the Johnny #5 rip-off was right! (is it too much to hope the kids will grow up to know that reference? Yeah, probably is). Why the hell did everyone leaves this mess for us to clean up?" It's just so... irresponsible. But we seem to be allergic to that these days. Responsibilty. And that's how the wheels eventually start to come off, because someone couldn't be bothered to tighten all the lugnuts properly. So simple, and yet apparently too much effort.


Yeah, I need to bring the next post back to comics. This kind of stuff just tends to make me grumpy.

Cheers...