The talk went to people throwing lit cigarettes out the window and finding people's names under big piles of drywall and our small victories at getting people to clean up after themselves. But you would be amazed at the people who drive on our rural roads and how much crap they think nothing of dumping into our pristine back country. The stuff people do when nobody is watching.
One of the lodge couples recently moved back to the midwest. He was a retired marine Gunny, doesn't matter who they are. He couldn't find work after he got out and wasn't good at much besides lifting a longneck and they managed to take so much equity out of her late father's house that they lost it. Scrambled back to wherever. Last night I heard that a hundred miles out of town they called somebody and said there are six dogs and five cats locked in cages back there, do something with them. Astounding attitude, I guess they were desperate. They made a clean break and someone else will have to clean up. Good thing somebody took the call and acted quickly. The animals may have suffered or worse.
I was listening to Hare, the psychologist who invented the Hare Psychopathic Testlist Revised that is most commonly used today, on NPR the day before yesterday. He talked about administering the most gruesome photographs to a control group and to a bunch of psychopaths. They measured reaction sensitivity between the two groups of subjects. The psychopaths registered nary a blip, the control group blanched and trembled and generally freaked out.
Many of us have become disassociated and desensitized to our world. This allows us to indulge in sociopathic behavior without guilt or remorse. We are either angry or have lost our capacity to feel. We reside in our own little solipsistic movie and everybody else is just a bit player in our personal drama.
I was reading some scientists report on methamphetamine's recently. They found that meth users lost their capacity to feel joy. The meth burned through their neural networks so fiercely that they could never register an emotion on a bandwidth called joy. Welcome to hell I guess. Can you imagine the inability to feel joy? I guess that is when we devolve into something truly less than human.
Anyway here's to picking up our stuff and accepting our responsibility to live in our shared world.
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I caught the kids eating breakfast on the power pole this morning. Not the best pic, didn't bring the right lens but you get the picture. Fat coney, we got a ton of them this year. Coyotes aren't doing their job. My cat and the juvenile hawks are sure doing their part.
2 comments:
I moved from rural Colorado to rural California a dozen years ago. I immediately noticed a great deal more debris on the roadsides here than I ever saw in my former home. Mattresses, dishwashers, not to mention all the litter. I may be wrong but this just seems like part of the culture here. Not sure if it's a culture with a lack of willingness to clean up after itself, or a culture which is just too willing to release inanimate things into the wilderness on their own recognizance.
I don't see it in the mid-west. I don't see it in the Rocky Mt. region, but among the many things Californians share with those who live below the Mason-Dixon Line, excessively littered roadsides is high on the list. rc
Concur.
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