A person is like a piece of plastic, unique in one million different ways that distinguish it as heterogeneous to the group or population, yet so trite that it’s thrown this way and that, never minding the places it goes or the things that it does.
Like people, plastic is made by the millions, manufactured in groups. Perhaps you will have a million pens or a million plastic bags all identically formed by the environment that produced them; yet, in time going their separate ways and never doing exactly the same thing, though they are always capable of doing what the other has done.
The only thing that is produced as fast as plastic is people, each belonging to a culture just as every piece of plastic belongs to a factory. While we concern our individuality as our egotistic identity, we are in fact manufactured by the society we live in. Always trying to fit a mold, a plastic mold, so that we may know what the hell we are supposed to be.
Plastic can do many things, it is functional, practical, creative, beautiful, and just as diverse in purpose as people are. People can be writers, and plastic can be a pen. People can be athletes, and plastic can be a ball. In pictures and memories, we never die, and likewise plastic will never leave the earth, even after its purpose is done.
For nearly everything we do, so too plastic can be. Purpose and characteristics are never-ending, and it seems as though only plastic and people can be anything, everything, and remain just as they are, always.
First it was people but now it is plastic. One and the same, they are journeymen and destroyers, hailed as progressives for all that they can do. Savoring their conceited self-worth, they fail to see that they’re destroying the earth. A virus and sickness to the host they inhabit, people chop down their trees, burn coal, kill animals to extinction, and make the air unbreathable.
Having spread to every corner of the earth, man has evolved that his environment must now change to him because he believes he is superior and is under the delusion of omnipotence so that he will no longer change himself to the world but feels entitled to have the world change to his will and whims.
Like man, plastic is unapologetic as its gross pollution of the world, and litter is a kind word for overpopulation by a useless and irremovable object. Most of it becomes trash that has no purpose and is only reflected as once having potential, kinda like people. Once discarded, the once unique and beneficial plastic refuses with all its strength to leave, making its simple existence a pollutant of the most beautiful beaches, and pristine oceans.
Like the deer who wonders through the strange and uninhabitable neighborhood scavenging in our gardens for anything to eat, a child in a poverty stricken country picks rotten food out of a landfill because the plastic doesn’t know how to stop, and feels no pity for the child who wonders where the grass has gone.
Plastic is hard, cold, and lifeless. It expresses no joy in the things that it does, it is simply a thing that does, without any will of its own. So many people, like plastic, have no idea what they are doing. Their main concern is to just look useful so they do not get cast aside like a broken object in a landfill. So many people are cold, indifferent, and inexpressive of life or complaining of not having one at all. Like plastic, we are set in our ways and only yield to change under the most strenuous and extreme circumstances or pressures.
Like the girl who lies behind the camera lens, so too does plastic deceive you. We see smiles, happiness, confidence, a living thing that breaths and lives, only to find that your personality is kept only in a picture, like the plastic that will never breath. While you feel that there’s something behind the smile, you find that the exterior is all that there is. That it was a lifeless gesture with no real reflection of what is inside the person. A person may be sad, mad, pissed or just ugly, but when it’s time to be seen they will smile. They will be fake, they will be plastic.
And like the plastic toy a young kid makes his companion, people are also fake companions to each other, over imaginative as to what we really are. We laugh and we play but when we get to reality and see what we really are, you can wonder if we even breath. If we ever really were human. And while on the outside we may look like one thing, may even be built to do one thing, people, at their core, are plastic.
