“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
Margaret Mitchell
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”
“IOTD” is image of the day, a concept I came up with. I teach visual meditative therapy – or in easy terms – a mini mental holiday. For some people it is very difficult for them to get their image right. I post an image a day for people to use in their mini mental vacay. Some are serious, some are silly, and some are just beautiful!”
Once we have taken out the trash, we often forget that it all has to go somewhere. But not many of us know exactly where it goes, nor do we usually think about it.
The Life Cycle of Garbage shows what happens to your trash once it leaves your home, to give you an idea of where it ends up and how much of it there really is.
The Life Cycle of Garbage begins in your home
Your kitchen trash can fills up …
So you take the garbage bag out to your curbside trash container …
And the garbage man comes to empty it …
What happens to all your trash once the garbage man takes it away?
Typically it goes to a Transfer Station …
A transfer station is where local trash is taken and dumped before it is transferred to its final destination. The final destination could be:
A Landfill …
where the waste is buried and left to decompose, a process which takes hundreds of years even for biodegradable materials …
An Incinerator …
where the garbage is burned and turns into ash and heat, sometimes used to generate energy (called waste-to-energy) …
Or a Recycling Center …
where it will be transferred to a manufacturing plant so these materials can be used to make new products!
Or In the Ocean …
If waste is not correctly managed, it can end up harming the environment and polluting our air and water.
Illegally dumped trash and litter can end up:
Littering our Communities …
This is why it is so important that we put our trash into the proper containers and recycle as much as we can. Garbage does not simply disappear once it leaves our homes, it all ends up somewhere and has an impact on every single person in some way.
Small actions can have a huge impact.
“As it appears in … full read/full credit/more pictures”
Like a good white, middle-class American woman, I used to pride myself on trying to be “colorblind,” on saying to my friends of different ethnicities, “I don’t think of you as Black or White, as Hispanic or Asian. Heck, I don’t even *see* the color of your skin.”
Until the day my friend Isobel brought me up short. “What you are saying when you say that,” she said, “is that you don’t even see who I am. You are saying that you are choosing not to see a huge part of my identity, because who I am — the experiences I have had, the prevailing culture I grew up in — has been profoundly shaped by the color of my skin.” (Or words to that effect; I am taking some editorial license here.)
It was a slap across the face that opened my eyes and changed me. Because the harsh truth, once I admitted it, is that when I was saying, “I don’t see you as Black or Asian,” I was really saying, “I am pretending that you are just like me white.” The harsh truth is that I was projecting my own life experiences and expectations onto them. The harsh truth is that my nonwhite friends have been subjected to prejudices and humiliations and fears that I will never, ever experience. And those experiences are part of who they are as human beings.
Yes, we must treat all people the same, regardless of the color of their skin, but we — especially we white Americans — have to stop pretending that we don’t see the differences, have to stop pretending that we all have the same “American experience.” We must be willing to say that our society is NOT colorblind, that our society does not treat all people the same.
You can follow Isobel here on Facebook: What a Witch.
It’s worth noting that she wrote this in 2012, two years before the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, two years before he was blamed for his own death because his toy gun didn’t have a bright orange plastic piece at the end.
Officer Who Shot Tamir Rice Had ‘Dismal’ Handgun Performance
The Cleveland police officer who shot a 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun last month had been judged not up to the job of police work two years earlier when he worked for a different force, according to internal memos published by Cleveland.com on Thursday.
On November 22, Officer Timothy Loehmann of the Cleveland Division of Police shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds after arriving at a Cleveland park where Rice was playing with the gun.
It Is What It Is 