Ginormous

You probably know this about me, or have figured it out if you have read my blog for a while.  I was born in the fifties, was too young to truly understand the sixties. I graduated from high school in the seventies. I tell you this simply to put a time frame around my comments today. I think it will be important.

Garbage. Let's talk about garbage. The world I was born into handled garbage in a very simple way. Everything was disposed of through the trash can you hauled to the curb once a week, or it was burned. At my house, we burned paper from the house and the office in an incinerator. It was basically a barrel on wheels set up to provide air to a fire and elevate the temperature and rate of burn to turn everything you put into it to ash. It was very effective. One of my jobs around the house was to empty the trash cans in mom's home office and burn all the paperwork. This was the most effective way to deal with the personal and confidential information from the clients.

So, garbage/trash left our house primarily by being burned or via the garbage truck,. Oh, and a couple of other things. We had a public dump we could always take things to. It was an old rock quarry you could unload things into and the city would manage the process from there. We also had a hole at the bottom of my grandparent's horse pasture we would dump things into and then once a year, hopefully on a calm day, we burned it all in a big fire. It was typically exciting as there were usually aerosol cans in the mix resulting in explosions or in the alternative. The fire might get away from us a little bit - another story all together.

I know, that's a lot about garbage, right? I think the information is important as I need to compare it to today. Today, in my garage there are two trash bins. They are the same size and one is for "single stream" recycling and the other is for trash. The trash is picked up once a week and the recycling every other week. The interesting part is the recycling bin is always overflowing. I could probably use a second container for the recycling. As a comparison, my garbage container could be a quarter of the size it is and there would still be plenty of space. Many weeks the container only has one trash bag at the bottom, only because we went around the house and collected everything.

How did this all change from the seventies until now? Was there a moment in time it was legislated or ruled to change? No, it happened a little bit at a time, one small step, continuing to move toward the point we are at today. I am also sure we're not at the end of the process. Products will continue to be made more recyclable and recycling will continue to get easier. 

Now, how does this all tie to the word ginormous? When the movement moved from hauling and burning garbage to recycling a large part of it, the overall problem was ginormous. There was no way one person could take it on and have any success. What it took was a significant percentage of folks deciding they would do what they could. It would have been easier to throw up their hands and say it was impossible for them, as a single individual, to accomplish anything around recycling. Interestingly enough, I know there are people who still take this position. In the USA, the latest number I could find was 80.1 million tons recycled in the latest reporting year. This is far from nothing. It is still only slightly over a third of the trash produced, but it is a far cry from where we were in the sixties and the seventies. Trash was a ginormous problem back then, and it is less of a problem today.

What I am trying to get at today is a way to think about the ginormous problems of the day. Pick one. Whatever is most important to you. The odds are you are not able to "fix" the problem by yourself. It may take years of starts and stops, of taking two steps forward and one back, to actually have an impact on the problem. But personally doing something about a ginormous problem today will have an effect on it down the road. Don't wait. Decide you are going to do something about the ginormous problem you see as critical today.

I am reminded of an old expression: you can only eat an elephant one way; one bite at a time. I encourage you to think about which ginormous problems is your elephant and take the first bite. You may never even see the change, but it will be there, because of your involvement. I know collectively we can improve our world and make it a better place. And it starts over again, every day. Every day there is the opportunity for each of us to change our world in incredible ways.  

Go ahead, began a change today, or move a change forward.

Optics

In this historical time, as we are all "learning" our way through new and different situations/things, I am sure you have hearing and thinking more and more about the way we look at situations and people. I know I've really had some things which stopped me in my tracks. In a time in my life, when I thought I was pretty set in the ways I looked at the world, there have been moments which shook me deeply. 

In the middle of this I want to say thanks to Sigourney IA, and the family and friends who raised me. I count myself as blessed for all that community and its people put me through.  This includes, but is not limited to, my mom and grandparents, Bill and Leah down the street, the county sheriff, the state trooper, my Jr High and High School principals, and a ton of friends and family.

Why am I thanking these people? For pushing me to look at the world without blinders on. They taught me through word and deed to listen to and learn everything I could. We sat at the kitchen table, or at the table at Bill and Leah's, or in a booth at Spaghett's and talked about the world events and how to think about the world. How to think about it with an open mind. They taught me this within a community backdrop that was pretty homogeneous. In my own way, I saw the world much the way a horse wearing blinders does, only seeing part of it. The thing I thank all the people I grew up around was they pushed a bigger world in through my ears, even while I only experienced a small slice.

Then I had the opportunity to go to school at Drake University. I know there are a ton of great schools out there. Drake is where I landed and it was a tremendous decision for me. Many of you know I had trouble leaving there, it only took nine years. The reason I speak to my Drake years next was this was the time in my life I found out how many different kinds of people there are and the variety of situations they come from. Early in my freshman year, I found myself shying away from others different than myself - their color of skin, religious background, speech pattern, sexual orientation, any number of things. In the middle of it, when I was seeing only with my eyes, I found the words those who raised me had pushed into my head. Honestly that was the moment in time I decided I could learn from all of these people I lived with. So, I worked to take off the blinders. I listened and questioned. I tried foods and music and dance and religion. Thing I had never experienced. I learned a ton. things that would never really be important, but I also found out I was, and still am, a lifetime learner. I am still this today, and honestly, sites like YouTube were absolutely built for me. So, as long as I am able, I will work to take the blinders off and look/listen and learn based on what is around me.

Now, here is one of the points I have a huge blind-spot for. It seems to me that given the rest of my commentary today, I should share at least one. Without question, if someone comes to me looking for a job, while wearing a set of pliers on his belt, I am inclined to hire on the spot. Now, this can't be someone who purchased a brand-new set on the way in to the interview. No, those pliers have to feel like they belong and the person wearing them is comfortable. In fact, in a perfect world, I would want to believe the person wearing them could rewire a nuclear sub with those pliers if they needed to. I've hired people in the lumber business, the distribution business and now the petroleum business with this "badge" and I have never had it go wrong. It might someday, but so far, so good.

When you read this, think about the way you look at the world around you, and the people within that world. Saying that you will "walk a mile in their shoes" is just not possible. We are never able to understand everything going on for another person, or what got them to the point they are , but we can recognize their experience is different from ours, and they have the right to feel the way they want about it. Try where you can to take off the blinders and look at the world the way children do, "through new eyes".

Have a great weekend and learn something.