Posted on 01/04/2017 11:48:26 AM PST by OddLane
Archaeologists are interested in the rubbish left by past civilizations: by their detritus shall ye know them. What people throw away reveals as much about them as what they buy in the first place.
But we don’t need to await the passage of three millennia before the study of what people discard becomes instructive. My country, Britain, is now the litter bin of Europe, a kind of vast rubbish dump, and I have been interested in British litter, and littering, for a number of years. The thoroughness with which the country has been befouled, from the grandest city thoroughfares to the most remote country lanes, is astonishing. It is as if it had been host to evangelists of litter who wanted to spread it everywhere, as missionaries once traveled to the farthest islands in the Pacific to spread the Gospel.
I began paying attention to the phenomenon of rubbish on my daily walk between the general hospital where I worked in the morning and the nearby prison where I worked in the afternoon, a matter of a few hundred yards. What should have been clear to me already from the observable behavior of my fellow citizens then became obvious: an Englishman’s street is now his dining room.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Yeah, it was the vitamins that did it, not the discipline.
I dated an archaeology major chick from UC Berkeley who, on a field trip, discovered an native American trash heap, called a “midden”.
It was all grown over with plants, but had shells and bones and stuff, indicating their diet.
She was retarded. She’s a pilot now.
These are adolescents who not only come from fatherless homes, but homes where there is no discipline and probably no one who has completed their secondary education.
Fundamentals such as basic nutrition and normative social behavior are foreign to them.
Dalrymple has written some brilliant essays exploring how terrible cultural ideas have filtered down through the ruling class and devastated heretofore working class communities.
This is like the inverse of Sowell’s “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” where blacks picked up what we know as ghetto culture from their Anglo and Scots Irish slave masters, who were extremely low class but managed to better themselves, while the former slaves remained culturally behind. Now we see Brits sinking deep back into that ghetto culture all by themselves. Tragic!
Also, whenever I read about British obesity I just have to post this crazy song!
Now I know what they did with the fish and chips wrap....
I’ve read about that book here on FR, it sounds both fascinating and depressing.
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