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America the Not-so-Beautiful by Andy
Rooney
Next to saving stuff I don’t need, the
thing I like to do best is throw it away. My idea of a good time is to load up
the back of the car with junk on a Saturday morning and take it to the dump.
There’s something satisfying about discarding almost anything. Throwing things
out is the American way. We don’t know how to fix anything, and anyone who does
know how is too busy to come, so we throw it away and buy a new one. Our
economy depends on us doing that.
Sometime around the year 500 B.C., the
Greeks in Athens passed a law prohibiting people from throwing their garbage in
the street. This Greek law was the first recognition by civilized people that
throwing things away was a problem. Now, as the population explodes and people
take up more room on Earth, there’s less room for everything else.
The more civilized a country is, the worse the trash problem is. Poor countries
don’t have the same problem because they don’t have much to discard. Prosperity
in the United States is based on using things up as fast as we can, throwing
away what’s left, and buying new ones.
We’ve been doing that for so many years that (1) we’ve run out of places to
throw things because houses have been built where the dump was and (2) some of
the things we’re throwing away are poisoning the Earth and will eventually
poison all of us and all living things.
Ten years ago most people thought nothing of dumping an old bottle of weed or
insect killer in a pile of dirt in the back yard or down the drain in the
street, just to get rid of it. The big companies in America had the same
feeling, on a bigger scale. For years the chemical companies dumped their
poisonous wastes in the rivers behind the mills, or they put it in fifty-gallon
drums in the vacant lots, with all the old, rusting machinery in it, up behind
the plants. The drums rusted out in ten years and dumped their poison into the
ground. It rained, the poisons seeped into the underground streams and poisoned
everything for miles around. Some of the manufacturers who did this weren’t
even evil. They were dumb and irresponsible. Others were evil because they knew
how dangerous it was but didn’t want to spend the money to do it right.
The problem is staggering. I often think of it when I go in the hardware store
or a Sears Roebuck and see shelves full of poison. You know that, one way or
another, it’s all going to end up in the Earth or in our rivers and lakes.
I have two pint bottles of insecticide with 3 percent DDT in them in my own garage
that I don’t know what to do with. I bought them years ago when I didn’t
realize how bad they were. Now I’m stuck with them.
The people of the city of New York throw away nine times their weight in
garbage and junk every year. Assuming other cities come close to that, how long
will it be before we trash the whole Earth?
Of all household waste, 30 percent of the weight and 50 percent of the volume
is the packaging that stuff comes in.
Not only that, but Americans spend more for the packaging of food than all our
farmers together make in income growing it. That’s some statistic.
Trash collectors are a lot more independent than they used to be because we’ve
got more trash than they’ve got places to put it. They have their own schedules
and their own holidays. Some cities try to get in good with their trash
collectors or garbage men by calling them “sanitation engineers.” Anything just
so long as they pick it up and take it away.
We often call the dump “the landfill” now, too. I never understood why land has
to be filled, but that’s what it’s called. If you’re a little valley just
outside town, you have to be careful or first thing you know you’ll be getting
“filled.”
If 5 billion people had been living on Earth for the past thousand years as
they have been in the past year, the planet would be nothing but one giant
landfill, and we’d have turned America the beautiful into one huge landfill.
The best solution may be for all of us to pack up, board a spaceship, and move
out. If Mars is habitable, everyone on Earth can abandon this planet we’ve
trashed, move to Mars, and start trashing that. It’ll buy us some time.
