Soapbox Time: An Elegy for Decency

This morning, I walked out of Target, a responsible citizen in a crumbling world, pushing my empty basket to its rightful resting place. A small, noble act—putting something back where it belongs.

It should have been simple.

It should have felt good.

Instead, I found a shrine to apathy: the scattered remains of fast food meals, wrappers fluttering like defeated flags, soda cups collapsed in surrender.

Fries lay drying in the sun, abandoned, forgotten—sacrificed to a god of laziness.

Target itself has been slipping for months now, a once-proud ship taking on water.

Clothes strewn like driftwood, broken displays leaning like weary soldiers, aisles littered with the half-hearted evidence of people who can’t be bothered.

But this?

Trash tossed onto the earth, not ten steps from a waiting bin?

This feels different.

This feels like surrender.

A small piece of me wanted to gather it up, to make it right.

Another part—the louder part—stood there, arms crossed, whispering, “Let them sit in the mess they make.”

I wonder sometimes if the fall of a civilization starts exactly like this:

Not with war or fire,

but with wrappers left on the ground,

and too few of us willing to care.