Snow Shoveling as Societal Analogy

A week or so ago I was walking back home. I saw a man shoveling out his big pickup truck from the snow bank. It had obviously been there for awhile. As he shoveled out from under a few feet of snow he would then throw the snow into the middle of the street.

He could of easily thrown the the snow onto the large part of the divider cobblestone that nobody really can walk on that separated him from the sidewalk, but he just threw it into the street.

Part of me hopes that he was just doing it so that the cars would more quickly melt it by driving over it, but the other part of me questioned…

“What has happened to the public commons of our great nation?”

We used to be a nation that valued the public commons. We could all till the land together, and collectively reap the benefits. Those cooperative days are gone, besides only communists work together.

But isn’t this man shoveling his own private snow waste into the public street representative of so much else that we do to our public commons and each other?

It’s as if some “invisible hand” will just fix up all that we dump that results from our private excesses, and just fix it up.

Stuff like global warming… and things like that.

Yes, that man may have just been trying to get his truck out of the snow, but in pursuing his own purely private gain, he might have caused an accident when a car driving by skidded on the snow, or the ice, if it stayed over night.

Aka…Cyrus Random Thoughts When He Is Bored and Walking on the Street.