We just keep throwing the boomerang.

My neighbour won't get her big pile of tree-branches off her lawn, which also drapes a few feet on to my own lawn. It's been about two months since her water line broke and the city came to fix it and had to saw off a decent chunk of one of her trees. It bothers me, and it bothers me that it bothers me. It's just a pile of sticks. It's winter; everything is dead under the snow anyway. It's not killing my already almost-dead potentilla bush that's under all that somewhere. But still, I have to beat back passive-aggressive rage at least once a day when I look at it.

They don't keep a very clean yard. As a person who's planning on selling her home a few months down the line, it does effect the external aura of my home that buyers will sniff out, for sure. This is where my brain goes: People don't want to stare at a few broken-down vehicles next door for months on end. People don't want to stare at a pile of dead branches for months on end. But listen to me. I just said "people" when I should have said "people like me--white people, middle-class people, people who don't have better things to do than to think about a state of tidiness in the neighbour's yard and how that state of untidiness overlaps onto my property line."

Other people don't care about that stuff--my neighbours for one. I heard a radio program state that middle-class (white) folks see their yards as reflecting themselves. It's so petty, so see-through-obvious that it's just a consumer lie to keep us busy on things that have no value whatsoever. A scruffy-looking home doesn't at all reflect on whether or not someone is a good person, but that's what I've been taught to believe, and that's the vomit I have to swallow back down when I realize I am just living out some stupid fantasy some idiots dreamed up insisting that people who are valuable are people that are:

- on time
- tidy
- extroverted
- hygenic
- only have body hair in certain areas
- have certain facial features
- attain a certain body-shape
- wear trendy apparel
- dress their children and house and car and cellphone in trendy apparel

Do I really have to tell myself that it doesn't matter if my lawn is a universal shade of green? That an empty shelf doesn't have to be filled with knick-knacks? That I am harming a human being when I do not consider the ethics of where my food comes from? That my self-confidence cannot stem from my outfit or body weight?

There's this nifty bible passage where Jesus is rebuking the Pharisees of the day for being self-righteous teachers who viewed the Law as a list of dos and don'ts for getting into heaven, while they were terrible human beings. We humans are drawn to simplicity: cause and effect, black and white. Do this, and get that.

If you have a tidy house you are a ____ person.
If you have a large house, you are a ______ person.
If your children's faces are always dirty, you are a ______ person.

The world is not black and white. It's complex. We know this, but we ignore it. At the end of Jesus' sermon, he says when you hear his words (as in, from the Christian perspective, the truth) you need to put them into practice. Comprehension without action is meaningless. I think this is true of any time we become aware of a truth. Oh, people suffer on account of my having coffee every morning. Switch to fair trade. Oh, it's not good for my body to eat so much artificial sugar. Reduce and eliminate. Oh, when I buy a new outfit every few weeks, I'm just getting sucked into consumer culture. Stop. Oh, when I buy X from Y, the people who produce X are suffering. Stop supporting those companies.

Of course it's hard. But if we don't beat to death these lies preached to us from both visible and invisible parts of our culture, lies about entitlement and comfort and security and self-worth and the nothing-is-too-much crap -- if we are complacent, if we are aware that we are harming another human and yet feel no desire to stop that act, we are ceasing to be human. When I know that I am just another wolf in some kind of deer-feeding frenzy, I have to stop. The world does not have my best interests at heart. If we do not question the irrational way we think, such as feeling passive-aggressive or questioning the "goodness" of a neighbour for simply leaving a pile of dead tree on her lawn, we're the cogs. We know the truth but don't act, because we're lazy, because we like the simple formulas that give us purpose and meaning, things that keep us busy and comfortable. We are losing grip on humanity. We are objects traded and used for wealth, and we are actively participating in it, complying, we are saying yes, use me! Use them! Please! 

We just keep throwing the boomerang.