After you've eaten a TV...
Illustration
After you've eaten a TV dinner, what do you have left? The cardboard package, the bag it came home from the store in, the foil wrapper, the aluminum tray, the residue of the food (juice, gravy, chicken bones, and so forth), a paper napkin or two, an aluminum can, a Styrofoam cup, a plastic knife and fork, and paper towels to wipe up after -- and then put it all in a garbage bag. It's all disposable, after all. We are a disposable society. Manufacturers even plan for it -- many things we used to fix we now throw away, because it's set up to work that way. We have a whole industry built on our disposability -- the garbage industry. We are no longer impressed with something like Jesus' miracle of feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish. He had twelve big baskets of leftovers -- by today's methods he'd need twelve garbage trucks to haul away the leftovers! It's all for the sake of convenience. Who'd want to put themselves out anyway? Sure we pay for the packaging, plastic, and metal we throw away. Give that money to hungry people in a less industrialized society? Well ... no. Jesus' encounter with the little boy's lunch and 5,000 hungry people should impress us. The more we give away, the more we have. And less to throw away, yet more to use again. -- Mosley
