Tonight I'm working on solidifying a social theory about the level of our daily irresponsibility and inability to pick up after ourselves and not leave huge messy trails as relative to certain larger societal ills.

Children at work claw, chew, drool on and otherwise destroy property that isn't theirs (not that it is their fault) and the parents pull them away, screaming, but not admonishing them for making the mess or teaching them to clean it up; nor cleaning it up themselves.

Our military bombs, dismembers and disorganizes foreign races and nations and leaves behind "governments" that do little other than support our financial initiatives there, without cleaning up the ruins of the eons old structures or homes of those who inhabit the land.

Young men destroy the vehicular magazine aisle, rip magazines out of their bags, drop cards all over, remove covers, and throw the magazines onto the floor (while I am standing beside, fixing another shelf); or if they attempt to replace it, get it within one or two spaces of the proper spot... but just never quite there. All the while they guffaw about making their vehicles louder, faster, and higher/lower.

Our vehicles get larger, more consumptive, and more dangerous with each passing model. Drag racing in Albuquerque alone has killed dozens of non-involved parties in the last decade. In one case, a wealthy young man who was drag racing ran a red light and killed two people. He received a few years of probation and a brand new, speedier model from mom and dad.

People leave stacks of books, food and containers, wrappers, coffee and other assorted (and occasionally surprising) messes, without a thought to the person who cleans up behind them.

We've discontinued superfund financing. Pursuing alternative energy is a political joke that no self-respecting major party candidate (spare the greens) would even suggest as an alternative to opening the beautiful New Mexico Gila wilderness to oil exploration and drilling (despite New Mexico's excellent capacity for wind power on lands already used up by the oil rigs). We dump our trash, charge for recycling pickup (Ft. Collins, Colorado) and continue to develop (albeit small scale) nuclear arms right in my backyard.

Iraqi children are dying of leukemia at unimaginable rates, not because of exposure to Iraqi weapons, but because of the depleted uranium that the US and Britain left after their escapades early in the last decade. Our plans for a provisional Iraqi government after an (as of today) UN backed attack on the nation and possible regime change do not rank as priorities establishing healthcare (from nutrition to cancer treatment) or post-invasion reconstruction projects for the Iraqi people, but rather ensuring that the provisional government is friendly to American commercial interests in the nation.

We are a people who leave others to clean up our messes, whether we leave them in our own back yards, or in the workplaces or nations of other people. We might justify this by saying that it "is their job."

Every day, I have more than enough assigned work to occupy my time. Shelving, alphabetizing, pricing, and most importantly, helping customers find what they are looking for. In a disheveled department with messes piling up from all sides, I spend more time trying to keep the mess from overtaking me than helping people. Every night, I stay an hour and a half after close to complete whatever I couldn't finish during the day. If people picked up after themselves, finding what they wanted would be easier, we could handle a larger inventory, and the company could save money on the hours I didn't have to stay after to catch up.

An invaded (and conquered) nation has always similarly been left to clean up the mess left behind. The Iraqis have to care for the tens of thousands of leukemic children and the nearly 1.2 million who have died as a result of sanctions on their own. If the Iraqis weren't starved, oppressed, and as angry at the West as at their own tyrannical leader, I believe that they would have overthrown him long ago. Of course, their children perhaps would not be dying in scores and their masses starving to death if it were not for the policies of their leader, but I believe that they see the United States as the primary aggressor, as indeed we are. Anyway, if my children were dying of leukemia, I would blame first the nations that dropped the bombs and left us to starve.

But I guess that's all just a bad Friday night talking.

I'll leave you with some meditations from The Plague, by Albert Camus.

"In the small face, rigid as a mask of grayish clay, slowly the lips parted and from them rose a long, incessant scream, hardly varying with his respiration, and filling the ward with a fierce, indignat protest, so little childish that it seemed like a collective voice issuing from all the sufferers there... His mouth still gaping, but silent now, the child was lying among the tumbled blankets, a small, shrunken form, with the tears still wet on his cheeks."

"Nothing was more important on earth than a child's suffering, the horror it inspires in us, and the reasons we must find to account for it."