Consumerism Destructionism
In today’s world, we have so many things we take for granted. It is the simple little things, we do not think about throwing away and buying new. We take our trash to the curb, which is filled with all the things we loved for a moment in time and then it is gone. We show no remorse for our destruction of our culture and worldwide resources. Prepackaged breakfast bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches premade and boxed in a freeze section of a grocery store, even the garbage trash bags have boxes and pallets to be thrown away for something designed to be thrown away. Our consumerism from coffee cups to televisions fills our landfills, processed food destroying family life, vehicles we care less about than shirts, disposable items that are poisonous and wasteful, finally completely change American culture towards waste and destruction.
Simple things we use every day from our McDonald’s coffee cup to our Styrofoam packaging in our brand new HDTVs, all of it ends up in our landfills. Consider the trash that piles up in an average week around a house. I bet it looks a lot like the picture by Roe Ethridge (30). Think about it, an average American person produces over four pounds of trash per day. That means the 300,000,000 Americans multiplied four times for each pound is 1.2 billion pounds of trash or more each day. Every last pound of that trash is compacted and covered. This means that the things we do not feel so bad about throwing away like a banana peel or a paper plate will not get the chance to biodegrade since they are not exposed to air for the components to break down to soil level. The only way to slow this down is to reject our consumerist ways to avoid the destruction and waste of our lives.
So much of our trash is here right now and gone in less than thirty minutes. We have vastly changed our culture from that of a small amount of trash from food like an orange, to massively pre processed food. Children...