Paper or plastic

I spent a majority of this past summer in Seattle and while that city gets many things right, from planting itself next to great mountains and ending near beautiful water, it got some things wrong, requiring most women to belong to tribes of lesbians to name just one, but clearly one thing Seattle is getting right is requiring people to pay attention to the choice of being stupid or smart.
The choice of paper or plastic for most lazy Americans is really so 1980’s that it should be illegal in every state except Texas which is not really so much a state as it is a penal colony at this point. No, Seattle allows you to use plastic at the checkout at your favorite store, but if you choose to use a plastic bag you pay for it, as you should.
See, the problem with most of us, is we don’t pay for the damage we do. We waddle through life, using and abusing all that is around us, throwing garbage on the ground and expecting someone else to clean up our mess and waddling off as if big momma government will fix all our problems. Then, as if we are spoiled idiotic children, we demand the big momma of government lower our taxes and cut programs, the very programs that hire even more idiots who carry bags around to pick up the trash that these same idiots throw on the ground, see how it works?
So what should we do? Could we just be adults and stop throwing our shit on the ground? No way in hell. Just a few weeks ago I was walking off a ferry in Seattle and a young man was walking in front of me, holding hands with what I presumed to be his hideous girlfriend and in his other hand, he was drinking a large McDonalds sugar filled drink and oh how the god mayor of New York would have a field day with a moron like this guy, because not a minute later this pathetic excuse for a human would decide he was done with his drink and not bother to use one of Seattles numerous trash cans, no he just dropped it into the street. That is how people deploy their garbage, not just in Seattle mind you where hippies and liberals actually have a say in how people behave, but in super conservative enclaves like Denver and the super porcine state of Florida.
The problem, one of many, is of course we have become a nation of imbeciles and self centered assholes. Who else feels entitled to drink gallons of soda and on a whim drop the container into a street? Imbeciles and assholes, that’s who.
One easy solution is to charge morons for the right to do things, like drink large sodas that most humans can neither drink, hoist or carry (like New York City is planning to do) and charge these same lame idiots to use a plastic bag, which Seattle does now. Why charge for a plastic bag? Because stupids can not be trusted to do anything the right way. It’s true, we can’t trust stupid people to do much right, they can’t drive, they can’t raise children and they most certainly can’t dispose of plastic bags in any sort of proper way. Seattle charges you if you want to use a plastic bag and it’s about time.
I think the charge is five cents a bag and that is not nearly enough. In a more perfect world the charge should be 5 dollars for the first plastic bag and fifty bucks for any bag after that. Why? First, it would limit the use of the bags, which really is the purpose of the charges and second, it would stop stupids from using bags at all, because quite honestly, what we are trying to do as a society at this point is limit the stupids from doing more damage than what they are already doing, isn’t it?
Seriously, smart and caring people never did use plastic, they always carried recycled bags into Whole Foods and you know it. No, the law in Seattle was designed to punish and embarrass the stupid and the immature, like the soda drink dropper I witnessed, it is a way to teach the stupids a lesson their stupid parents were too lazy to instill in them. As a society we have grown weary of prisons and schools that do not have the time to keep repeating and teaching morons the same things that responsible parents should have instilled into children during formative years decades ago, so we now just charge them for the lessons.
Seattle and New York may be testing grounds, but the rest of the country will catch up, because the truth is, we can’t allow the idiots and the dummies to run the country. We see it all the time, stupids demand better roads and better schools and at the same time deeper cuts in taxes, never bothering to wonder how you can have both. So, while we can not go back to teach fundamental math to morons, we can still do the simple things, like charge meatheads for the damage they do to the world, at a nickel a shot.