Moral pollution

This morning I walked by an empty water bottle tossed on the side of the road. It had been there all week. I got to thinking.

I remembered a scene in Titanic where something (I thought it was a marble but my daughter says it was a bullet) rolls slowly off a table in an early, clueless stage of the impending disaster. No one particularly notices it --- no more than one would notice the scene of nobody picking up a discarded water bottle. It is a non-incident. But I was persuaded this morning that whatever government-funded, "golden-fleece award candidate, studies there have been to determine the state of the union, there are no indicators more telling than the sight of a pedestrian walking casually past litter, litter that's only feet away from a trash receptacle.

This non-act is full of speech. The person walking past (me, in this case) has seen the trash and made an instantaneous mental transaction that is the microcosm of all her other daily mental transactions. Her entire world view is shoehorned into this microcosm. It's hardly conscious, of course. So I had to work on recovering my reasoning for you. I think it went like this:

"It's not my job." "The township's job; they're do it eventually." Or, "It doesn't matter."

A sociologist, or a Bible student, would have a field day with this. All I know is that if you multiply my attitude by a few billion people, and that, by thousands of choices a day, you probably have the decline of Western Civilization.