Why I don't recycle - a personal statement

I’ve recently noticed that even my progressive right-wing friends are stunned when they find out that I do not recycle. If I get a hold of an empty bottle or some scraps of paper in our house before my wife does - they are immediately sent to the normal garbage bin. I believe that my friends deserve an explanation.

I will use two stories to give some resemblance of reason behind my actions. I believe anyone who reads them will – if not outright agree with my position – but at least understand my rationale.

The first story is apocryphal, and I cannot guarantee its veracity. Lord Keynes, the infamous inventor of the Keynesian economics was a devoted teetotaler, he refused to smoke tobacco products, and he was a fanatical pacifist. The outbreak of the First World War left him outraged with the insanity of mass murder in a useless war. At some point later, he had heard the passionate speech of the British Prime Minister Lloyd George calling on the British citizens to shun the excesses of personal consumption, particularly drinking and smoking, as a sign of support for the nation’s war against Germany. Immediately after hearing this speech, Lord Keynes once and for all abandoned his previous habits, and engaged in heavy drinking and smoking. Surely Lord Keynes understood the health repercussions of these activities – but he could not resist the opportunity to give the middle finger to the establishment. While I am surely no Keynes, and we are not talking about the World War, I must still confess that the urge to give the middle finger to the liberal busy-bodies is a pretty laudable feeling.

The second story features two famous Russian poets, Joseph Brodsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and one famous Russian writer, Sergey Dovlatov. It must be said that Brodsky was a  devoted anti-communist, and before immigration to the West, he was poor, his poems were not published. What is worse, at some point in his life he was exiled to Siberia by the regime because the government did not believe that being a poet qualified as a proper employment if he could not provide a government approved license.

Yevtushenko on the other side was a rather well-known poet, well-treated by the communist regime in spite of his occasional outbursts against the excesses of stalinism. One of his published poems was devoted to the heroism of the Soviet people during the building of a hydro-electric station on the Volga River (if you don't feel a sudden unstoppable urge to puke your guts out after you've read about the subject of his poem - I can bet serious money you never lived in a communist country). It should not surprise anyone that Yevtushenko's unofficial nickname "Euvtuch" was chosen due to an obvious similarity with the word "eunuch" (in Russian these two sound nearly identical).

Needless to say that Brodsky hated Euvtuch with all his soul. The reader should also realize that Brodsky indeed was one of the top nine Russian poets of all times (I believe the other eight are Alexander Pushkin, Michail Lermontov, Joseph Mandelshtam, Sergey Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Anna Akhmatova), and there was no comparison between the two of them – which was well understood by all educated Russians including Yevtushenko and Brodsky.

In 1972, Brodsky was expelled from the USSR, he immigrated to the United States, became a renown poet in his own right and won the Nobel Award in literature. But even this dramatic change of fate did not alter his attitude towards Yevtushenko. At the time, there were rumours that one of the root causes for this hatred was Brodsky’s belief that Yevtushenko was a KGB informant and that he was instrumental in its efforts against the young dissident poet. Whether it is true or not is unknown and unknowable - and at this point is beside the point.

Sergey Dovlatov, another Russian writer who found his fame after immigration to the US, was a close friend of Brodsky. According to Dovlatov, in the end 1980ies he visited Brodsky in the hospital. Brodsky was recovering from a heart attack in the intensive care unit, and his situation was quite serious. Dovlatov tried to cheer up the poet and told him that USSR was reforming itself, and that during the latest Party Congress, Yevtushenko was publicly advocating the abandonment of the system of collective farms and freeing the peasants from communist oppression. Brodsky thought about the news for a moment, and weakly replied – “If he is against the collective farms, then I support them”.

There surely is no doubt that Brodsky, like all progressive Russians, was solidly against the system of forced collective farms, and his retort was in pure jest. But joke or not, his attitude was easy to understand – if communist activists were against something, then it only made sense to support it. And to Brodsky, his arch-rival Yevtushenko was more than a "sell-out" or a "conformist" - to him, Yevtushenko was the epitome of the two-faced oppressive communist regime.

So, how does this all have to do with me? My political views were formed during the last 5 years of Soviet Union, and even today my natural inclination is to support everything that the communists oppose. After I have stayed for more than a decade in the US, my initial reaction to anything that liberals propose follows the same pattern. If liberals support the gay marriage, then I am against it. And don’t even start with Global Warming or recycling. If there is any way I can do to stick my finger in the eye of the left-wing establishment and the liberal busy-bodies – I will gladly do it. You may disagree with me – but who are you to throw rocks at me? Are you without a sin?

And when it comes to “recycling”, the most mind boggling thing is the level of self-righteousness of the left-wing activists, which knows no bounds or limits. The reader may well remember the South Park’s sarcastic episode which poked fun on the smug drivers of Toyota Prius. And indeed, as the cartoonists correctly noted – the real danger to the nation comes not from the pollution smog – but rather from the smug of the liberal busy-bodies, who won’t rest until everyone is forced to give up all of the life’s pleasure.

I am often puzzled how anyone can indeed surrender to the demands of the environmental wackos without any protest, let alone volunteer support for their agenda. It’s one thing if you decide to recycle a plastic bottle of your own volition, and it is quite another when the State coerces you to do it through fines or higher costs, while the smelly activists are pouring scorn at you for not following their orders fast enough. And the recent trends to ban plastic bags in the stores makes me wonder if the liberals have retained any sanity.

Now, that I shared my views on the subject – do you feel that my personal decision not to recycle is based on some logical arguments?