After I graduated from High School, it was natural to continue on to college. while I had a job during the day, I went to school at night. I talked my mom into going to a basic writting class with me. In this class, we were given a subject and we had to create an ‘op/ed’ style possition on that subject complete with research. One of the subjects chosen was trash and recycling.

I remember going to the library (Google what a library is if you don’t know, but I did not have the convienience of the internet for research back when I was in school) and reading, researching and then forming an opinion based on what I had learned. At that time in America, we had disposable pens like the Bic and the Papermate office stick, disposable diapers, cheap one-time use toothbrushes, one time use plastic cups from restaurants, styrofoam food containers from places like McDonald’s and Burger King, you could buy a shirt from a vending machine that was made from a cloth-like substance made of paper in an emergency. Everything had ‘planned obsolescence’ factored in the design and manufacture and Abortion was still fairly (less than 10 years from Roe v. Wade) new to society and I noticed that the divorse rate was on the rise.

All of this caused me to entitle my paper ‘The disposable society’ because marriages and people had become disposable and no one batted an eyelash about it. Disposability was not only factored in the manufacture of goods like cars and refridgerators, but in the minds of Americans as well. If you don’t like it, toss it in the trash. Come to think of it, I researched that over 35 years ago and it has become more prevolent in todays society. When we were done with our calculators and PDA’s like the Palm Pilot, batteries and old typewritters, appliances and so on, we just tossed them out and bought new. If you ‘Like’ someone, marry them, have your fun and when you are done or get tired of your spouce, get a divorce and start anew.

It was a joke that people like Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor had more marriages than underware. It was no longer a taboo to get a divorce just because you were tired of your spouse. I am not including those divorces of necessity, just those that I classified as disposable. Abortion was being used as a contraceptive instead of a necessity for the health of the mother or the product of rape or inncest. On a side note, I find it strange that a child has to have the permission of a parent to take an aspirin but no parental permission is needed to get a surgical proceedure like an abortion.

How many pets are discarded at the pound because it has become inconvienient to care for them? what could we find in our lanfills that ‘could’ be recycled? How many times did you ‘trade up’ to a new phone because you wanted something ‘bigger and better’? How many plastic pens could we find in our landfill? How many cloths get thrown away instead of donated to charity?

Our society can be judged by our attitude towards things. Do we negate things we no longer want? Do we throw away our children as easily as we discard an old, used pen? Do we discard our marriage as easily as last nights leftovers? There is no doubt that America is on the wrong path. My grandparents were not concerned with ‘things’ as much as ‘God, family and country’. My parents have the same values, so where did we, as a free society, go wrong?

Political correctness has most asuredly hurt as has tolerence. But the biggest turn has been the fact that we have allowed the ‘freedom from religion’ to dictate to the rest of us. We have also ‘tolerated’ a minority dictating what and how we should think. From our schools that have chased God away, to our courts that have forbidden God to be uttered to our homes where we have replaced God with our toys like TV, computers, tablets and our cell phones. So it seems that we have progressed from disposing our pens and diapers, to disposing our children and finally our God.

2 Chronicles 7:14