-What? You ask.
-Is this some kind of anti-global warming message? Your eyebrows pull together in angry confusion.
Before you grab Al Gore's Assault on Reason and start highlighting your favorite sections, before you hit the comment button to give me a piece of his mind and suggesting I check out greenpeace.org or throw some stats at me about the depletion of the salmon in Oregon, chill. All this global warming stuff gives me a headache honestly. Dare I say I don't care? I guess I do in that I-care-that-people-are-dying-in-third-world-countries kind of way. We'll call it detached compassion. But hear me out a sec. I was in the car yesterday with this girl who's an avid social activist. After discussing the French Revolution, anarchy, Obama, Osama, and Hillary, we found ourselves at a red light. All of a sudden this girl (we'll call her S) gets this crazed look like we were about to score dope or something and starts looking near/far, right/left.
-See any cops? She asked excitedly.
I didn't and shook my head, getting kind of excited myself off of her energy--a contact high even. And then she turns around in her seat to retrieve an old coffee cup, stained and semi-flattened. S rolls down her window, stops momentarily to look over at me as she does it, smiling like a psycho who's about to do I don't know what and drops the thing out the window. She rolls the window up quick after surveying the scene (this sounds like a really long red light, it wasn't, I just get caught in descriptions) and laughs like a fucking idiot. Bitch killed the buzz that's for sure, but after the anticlimactic event of her blatant littering, I got to thinking about it. Here's a girl who is so into social justice that she's got zines coming out her ears and every word she says ends in 'ism', whether it be fascism, racism or anarchism and she's getting a kick out of throwing shit out on the street like an oil guzzling, Hummer-driving redneck.
Three days later, I think I got it. With all the pro-green propaganda, all the global-warming apocalypse warnings, everyone's car turning into buzzing gnats or deep-fryers, littering is becoming sort of cool. That's right, cool. Think about graffiti and how it started out as this gross depressing volatile act of vagrancy. How it was a product of poverty and gloom and has somehow manifested it's way into the likes of established art institutions such as the MOMA. Graffiti has become a brand and a label, being printed onto $150 t-shirts and well-bound coffee table books. With sell-outs like BANKSY making books and profit off of the rebelliousness of drawing on walls, graffiti and street art has found its respected place in society. Could littering have taken it's delinquent place? It sounds ridiculous and it probably is. But watching S. and how excited she was to throw that cup out the window made me think about the importance of defiance, no matter how regressive and counterproductive it may be, the simple act itself holds a great meaning within the rebellious. Think about it next time you throw something on the ground--whether it be a cigarette or a trash bag from last night's party. Are you an idiot or are you making a small statement against the status quo? Maybe one day that scarlet-stained cigarette filter will be housed in an alarmed glass case in the Whitney or we'll all just die in a trash-infested, polluted, smog-suffocating Armageddon. With detached compassion, it won't bother you too much either way.
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