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I think I felt genuine despair for the first time today. The roar of leafblowers in my neighbors’ lawns finally did it for me.
As I carried out the mundanity of my work from home day, I told myself that the moment the cacophonous roar of their blowing let up, I’d run outside to work in the garden a bit. I wanted to rake a few more small batches of leaves into our raised garden beds – that’s what we use to cover them for winter.
Of course, the moment I finally made it outside another blower roared to life… I don’t even know how many houses down.
I put the rake down, and went back inside.
Are lawns and blowers a proverbial “First World Problem?”
While I wholly admit I’m more sensitive to sound than most, that’s really beside the point. The impact of the noise and emission pollution from five or ten houses down appeared to me in that moment, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. My noise-reducing earplugs could do nothing for me.
I simply wallowed in the despair of thinking about just how many millions of people go about their days thinking… “I know it’s kinda bad, but I’m just one person. It’s not that bad.”
The silence of suburbia in the roar of a leafblower
We exist in a world that rewards us for our minute acts of conformity. For silently accepting things that we know aren’t quite right, but would be “radical” to defy.
Leave the leaves? Unheard of. It may cause dead spots in our lawn. Buy a little less? No way. We all need stuff, after all. Engage in a respectfully confrontational conversation with someone we may love (or fear?)? Nope. Awkward.
And so – we blow the leaves. We remain silent in the face of injustice big and small. We drown out our silence with any action that reaffirms our smallness. We throw our recycling in the trash, and we buy what we’re sold. We ignore the cries of “Silence is violence!” from our youth, our marginalized communities, and those most impacted by the realities of our tolerance for these “little” injustices.
After all. Those people are over there. And we are here.
Too small? Or too afraid?
Throughout time, it has always been the reality that no small action is too small to make a difference. Yet we continue this process of justifying our “little” harms by buying into what systems of power tell us – you are too small to change harm, so you must perpetuate it.
We will never will these systems of power into creating change for us. Power seeks only to defend itself through the continued pressure to conform to norms that keep us silent – and feeling small.
But to engage in such radical defiance of this smallness is terrifying. To spare ourselves the crushing despair of acknowledging how very big each and every action is, we allow ourselves to remain small.
All this from the neighbors’ lawns?
It wasn’t just the leafblowers today. They set me on edge, for sure. But I experienced despair today because I can see change. Big change; systemic change.
I see this space teetering on the very edge of acknowledging that lawns and suburbs and silence and all of these things that define so many spaces are but symptoms of the insidious culture of consumption that is eating our planet alive.
And mostly, I despair that I can see that other people see it. I didn’t make any of this up. It isn’t new information. We as a culture know we must change.
But. Alas. In the name of lawns we pray…
Someone – anyone but me – please do something big. Because I am terrified of how much power is truly within my small.