What’s Wrong With America
For the last five years, I’ve lived on the outskirts of suburban supersprawl. North of me lie fields of corn and soybeans, fences and silos, little signs advertising the pesticides farmers are using this year. South on the same roads lie immense billboards, Targets and Walmarts and Home Depots, Starbucks and Burger Kings, housing developments with million dollar properties (Reduced! Now starting in the low $600s!) and overweight kids in the backseats of luxury sedans.
I drive an hour south to work five days a week. I pass fourteen strip malls and shopping centers, eighteen drive-thrus, twenty-two gas stations, two abandoned furniture stores, five car dealerships, a Cash For Gold that used to be a strip joint, and strange, sometimes mysterious old places tucked in among all that new mess, waiting their turn to become something new too.
One of these places is an animal rescue shelter with a friendly yellow sign out front, recently involved in a heinous and disturbing abuse case that shut its doors permanently. The full story is here. One officer called it “a feces-filled, carcass-covered death camp for dogs.” The owner of the place simply gave up one day, and seventeen dead and decomposing dogs were discovered just after Christmas last year. Some were “curled next to empty food bowls that had visible bite marks.”
Muddy Paws borders the area’s finest shopping center, a happy little faux town with roundabouts and an Apple store. Right next door sits a Potbelly and a Chipotle. Remember, these dogs starved to death. I imagine the sick smell of desperation and decay, and whines barely heard, while fifty feet away fat fools like us pulled up in SUVs and bought burritos to go, half of which ended up in the bottoms of garbage cans before our lunch breaks ended.
Where I work, I can save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, and no one blinks an eye. Lost in the zeroes, I say. Like most companies, we make something no one needs. In our case, luxury cheeses. Millions of pounds of it, and millions of dollars of profit, and thousands of employees globally … money for us, as they say, is no object.
Lunch for the office is brought in once a month as a morale-building celebration of that month’s employee birthdays, and the waste can be staggering. Endless pounds of food over-ordered and simply thrown away - entire catering pans full of rice or pasta, complete sandwiches, whole desserts - and again, no one blinks an eye. Lost in the zeroes. The thought is not for the waste, not even for the relatively paltry sum paid for that waste. The thought is only that everyone got enough to eat. Enough being not what needs to be consumed to survive, but instead just enough not to throw up.
I see this waste, I see this destruction, and I abhor it. It sickens me. Yet after my hour-long traffic fight, turning two gallons of gasoline into atmosphere-choking gasses, chugging a coffee grown five thousand miles away, I turn on the TV and watch commercials with images of starving children. And I do nothing.
