Material and human garbage

This article was written by one of our passionate readers, Mr. Tomasso Merlo. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not The European Sting’s position on the issue.

We in the rich world export plastic waste and import human waste. We are turning the planet into a huge garbage dump. We produce so much garbage that we no longer know where to put it and so we pay poor countries to take it. Even the toxic one. So they get sick and not us.

We spend our lives consuming useless stuff to gratify our petty ego, we spend our lives looking for meaning and well-being in some shopping center and all this while the vast majority of the peoples of the planet live in misery. A political and social bomb that sooner or later had to explode. We people of the rich world rule, the dominant model is ours. But we don’t want to take responsibility for it.

The more time passes, the worse it gets. We rich get fat on superfluous things and by wasting, the poor remain on an empty stomach. Meanwhile the world has gotten smaller. People and information spread at breakneck speeds. There are no secrets and so the poor pick up their rags and leave hoping to put some crumbs of Western pie in their stomach. For them, for their children.

And this despite the dangers of the long journey and despite knowing that the rich do not want them and treat them as human waste that they do not know how to dispose of. Refusals to hide because they destabilize their fragile certainties and their false identities. The poor have understood it, the rich have a damned fear. Fear of change. Fear of losing their stuff. Fear of a world that they have created but now they do not want to take responsibility for it. And as always, when fears arise, sooner or later some politician appears ready to speculate about it.

Instead of analyzing fears and overcoming them, politicians speculate on them without shame, even when they are the result of epochal hypocrisy. Like that of the rich world that exports plastic waste but does not want human waste. Because we rich people have a damned need for that human waste to work in our factories at night, to peel potatoes in our kitchens and deliver pizza to our doorstep.

We need it because we have few children. We need it because we don’t do certain jobs anymore because they are too tiring and poorly paid. But we are afraid to admit it and to face reality. We are afraid of taking on the responsibilities of this increasingly unfair and absurd world that we have created. We people of the rich world rule, the dominant model is ours. An unsustainable development model that generates a frightening social injustice that is leading us to self-destruction. Some rich people have more money than entire cities, than entire countries.

A madness. We destroy indispensable resources to produce useless goods to satisfy unnecessary needs. A madness. Furthermore, when it suited us, we did not hesitate to exploit the poor world and in most cases we still do. And again, we have never hesitated to rain bombs in the name of peace.

Rich but also hypocrites and victims of the fear of a world we have created. With politicians running on television to reassure everyone without being able to see beyond the next elections. With consumers rushing to find meaning and well-being in some shopping center.

With ships full of rubbish heading south while the poor head north hoping to put some crumbs of western pie in their stomachs. An immense garbage dump. Of material garbage. Of moral garbage.