NaPoWriMo_2024_Poem3

disposable people

The ancient rules were always that people were easier to lose than things. People tended to naturally make more of themselves even under conditions that would suggest that to bring new life into the world was, perhaps, an idea utterly devoid of planning. In reality it was an idea devoid of choice, devoid of understanding, devoid of anything but resignation. There can always be disposable people – our modern just systems tell us that human life is not valued based on higher principle but on production of some poorly defined societal value.

The modern rules have thrown the entire enterprise into havoc. It’s fine to have disposable people. They decay and form good compost and even if some rabblerouser lifts up a few useless voices they generally generate the soil that their children will till. Now, we have disposable things! This is a particular outrage as for all of our history we would collect jewelry and armor and valuables from the dead, when we could. The rules had one simple principle – people were disposable, things were not.

Now that both people and things are disposable we have run into the novel problem that too many things can clutter the planet and affect even the non disposable classes. It’s fine to send the disposables to their designated trash heap – it’s not fine for the proper humans to find that plastics can enter their blood. Things should be disposable for convenience, but perhaps we just need to return to when only that which could die and understand it was considered easily replaced.