It's All Disposable

Men should be like Kleenex, soft, strong, and disposable. ~Cher


I used to be friends with a married couple, a couple in the prime of their lives happily married for 3 years and, by their account, very in love with each other. So, it came as quite the surprise to me when I heard they were getting divorced. They weren't getting divorced because they no longer loved each other, there was no abuse, no infidelity. They were getting divorced because the wife had a medical condition that would not let her get pregnant and the husband wanted to have kids. The husband had decided to discard his wife for something completely outside of her control. To me, this was callous, cold, and heartless. His wife ceased to have value not because of who she was but because she could not give him something he desired. She had been reduced from a human being to convenience store. If I can't get what I want here then I will shop elsewhere.

I guess this should not surprise me because we live in a disposable society. If something breaks we throw it away, if something is old we trade it in for something new, if a newer model becomes available we purchase it and let the perfectly good, old model collect dust in the garage. In a disposable society, things no longer contain intrinsic value. The value becomes reduced to what the item can do for us, how the item makes us feel.

With this mindset, we now market many items that are made to be disposable, use them, abuse them and throw them away. We have disposable cups, disposable plates, disposable silverware, disposable cameras, disposable razors, disposable diapers, disposable, disposable, disposable.

This mentality creeps into our treatment of people, many who are treated as if they are disposable. We put our parent's in old folks homes (euphemistically called assisted living to assuage guilt) because it's inconvenient to care for them ourselves. We get a new spouse because the old one has some wear and tear or there's a hot new model that will help us feel better about ourselves. We abort an unborn child because it won't fit our lifestyle. When the most innocent, the most vulnerable, the unborn child becomes disposable in the eyes of a society then, I guess, it's all disposable.