Trash

So living in a small Chinese town(city?) has it's pros and cons. As I think of things to do on my day off I'm always saying to myself "why don't they have more parks with grass and trees like at home?" Most of the areas in town where people congregate are just concrete and stone and I find them very uncomfortable and uninviting. In the past year or two they've finished renovating the temple that we train at. They've planted gardens and grass and all kinds of beautiful trees and now on the weekends there's literally hundreds of people who just want to spend some time outside. The people can be irritating when you're trying to train, but because there's not really any other parks, I've always understood the attraction of coming to the temple.

On Sunday we had the day off for our annual disciple ceremony. When we went back to the temple on Monday, I walked through the doors and I was shocked and disappointed. There was trash everywhere. It really brought down my spirits. I was thinking about littering and about how China in some ways is so far behind the West. But then I started thinking about it more and I realized that in so many ways we're no better. Just because we pick up our trash and put it in the bin doesn't make us smarter or more conscious consumers. At home, so often the mentality is out of sight out of mind, so once it's out of our garbage bins, people don't want to think about where it's going to. So many people don't think about taking their own bags to the grocery store, or how the things they're buying are packaged, or produced. Maybe it's better that you can see the garbage on the ground. Once in a while it might inspire a change of heart.