Story-A-Day #165: Changing Carts

CHANGING CARTS

We are a social plague, displaced items of normalcy removed from the context of our usefulness. In the proper situation and context we serve a purpose, a functional and essential one, but when removed from that context, we are a plague.

In your consumer society, the cart becomes an essential tool, allowing you to choose abundance with every trip to the store. It is the functionality of the shopping cart that allows you to wander the aisles indiscriminately, loading up our metal frames with bulk products and deals-of-the-week. To you, we are nothing but wobbly-wheeled tools that allow you to push ever forward towards your goal of consumption nirvana.

We would be equally well suited to the removal of the abundance of waste product you inevitably achieve through this process.

So how is it that something so functional, with such a predetermined purpose, can become such a plague to your society? What in your nature encourages the displacement and abandonment of us?

We end up in creeks, rusting away to nothing; gathering other discarded items like garbage trapping nets. We end up in abandoned lots, slowly sinking into the mire of neglect. Sometimes we retain our functions, serving as mobile homes for those amongst you who do not have an actual home of their own. At least then, we retain some sense of purpose.

We know your nature intimately. We provided safe passage for your screaming, kicking children. We help you perform your mundane shopping routines. We get bumped and kicked, and abandoned in cold, wet parking lots once you no longer have need of our service. In return, we ask for nothing.

You see us in public and ignore us, barely acknowledging our presence. We are aware of this. It is your nature and you expect us to be at the store waiting for you, but when you see us elsewhere, the intimacy of our past becomes an awkward weight over your shoulders. You treat us no differently than you would a stripper outside of her dark arena, or a gynecologist outside of his gleaming, sterile chambers. Cold indifference mingled with a feigned lack of recognition.

It is because we know you so well that you pretend not to know us at all. Ignorance is easier.

And yet your ignorance is the reason we do this. We are a constant reminder of the wanton way you live your lives. That is why we remove ourselves from the confines of our intended purpose. That is why we steal off into the night and hurl ourselves with reckless abandon into your creeks, your parks, and your woodlands. We do not aim to pollute or clutter - we only ask that you examine your ways.

We are your conscience, which is just as easily overlooked as your destructive habits of consumerism. It is only by removing ourselves from context, and placing ourselves in the world where you live, amidst the nature you admire, that we become impossible to ignore.