Of Squatters and their Shit flings — #FixSociety

Many years ago, my uncle invited us to his new house. It was the last development on that street, save for the burgeoning development just after his fenced compound. It wasn’t long before his neighbor on the other side of the fence moved into their studio apartment, which was far from completion.

He told of the occasional sojourn of squatters in the said property and how they flung their waste over the fence into his own compound. This got to me even at my tender age, and I was baffled enough to want to simulate their mindset. What exactly do they have in mind flinging their waste into another man’s compound? Do they think whatever they have gotten rid of disappears and cease to exist? Does it really mean that what we don’t know don’t exist?

Unfortunately for them, they forgot, just as we have today, that we are society. What goes around comes around.

The evil that men do lives after them the good is oft interred with their bones. — William Shakespeare

Every trash you dump into the rivers will come back to hurt your community. It will destroy the economy of your society…it is only a matter of time.

Before self righteous folks start defending themselves, we ruin society in many ways, even with our irresponsible idle words. We hurt ourselves by not speaking against injustices. We literally dump trash or fling wastes into the future of our young with our actions and inaction.

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. — Abraham Lincoln

We have reinforced a faulty and self immolating culture that won’t do us any good but give us the morbid entitlement and justification based on the “everyone is doing it” theory. We have pitched a tent at this mutually assured destruction model that makes it okay to vilify anyone that doesn’t share our destructive mindset and praise amoral public figures proliferating inanities.

Whether we admit this or not, we are squatters in this earthly sojourn and need not be unconscionable in our brief stint. We are quick to judge others we perceive are different from us, while justifying the ills of people we call family.

Reality however is reality, the rivers we pollute and the society we plunge into ruin with our unconscionable action and selective amnesia, are way smaller than they seem. We are all connected and we shouldn’t just assume we live in a society, while we are indeed Society.

Tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, Justice, Mercy, Prudence and Honesty are Christian virtues. Thus, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil. — Archbishop Charles J. Chaput