Yesterday when I was listening to the radio, a quote from the story Detroit Neighborhoods Take Matters into Their Own Hands caught my attention: "People will say, well, they are never picking up my garbage, or they don't board up the houses, or they came and boarded up some houses. And so our question is: Well, who are the they? And that has changed, that they have to become us."
It seems to me that more and more, our lives are made by "them," not by "us." We have people to raise plants and animals that become our food, to do the processing to turn the plants and animals into food, to make our clothes, to make our trash disappear, to provide electricity and heat, to build our houses. When someone else is doing the work, it's easy to be critical of them for not doing it perfectly. When we try to do something ourselves, we realize that it's actually not so easy.
No comments:
Post a Comment