Editorial: Getting better, but not yet

EVERY All Souls' Day at the cemetery is a time for reflection, not only on our dead, but on how we conduct ourselves.

Our cemeteries are getting more and more crowded with more and more dead people and moreso, more and more visitors remembering their dead loved ones during this season of remembering.

As expected, the cemeteries were again littered to the hilt. Garbage was everywhere, a reflection of how we as a people remain unmindful of how we are of our garbage.

We troop to the cemeteries with everything we can bring from home and then just dispose of the wrappers nearby.

There’s a little improvement though. The garbage are now thrown in dumps in some hastily selected corner; and so there are mounds and mounds every ten meters or so. It’s definitely an improvement from maybe a decade ago, when garbage would be strewn everywhere but still a mess once the crowd clears.

We’re still looking forward to the day when every Dabawenyo and visitor who gathers at local cemeteries for All Souls’ Day will not just remember to pray for their departed ones and mingle with their families but also remember that garbage has to be disposed of properly, all the time.

In the larger picture, this is not just how we dispose of our garbage. It is how we take care of our environment. Planting trees once a year to celebrate this and that does not an environmentally-concerned individual make. It’s just planting a tree, period. It’s how you nurture the tree, how you appreciate the other trees, and how much you would give your time to in protecting the trees that truly matters.

Back to the garbage, it’s now about putting your piece of garbage carefully on top of an existing mound. Rather, it is how distasteful you find making a mound of garbage, being aware of how much garbage you make, how much effort you exert to reduce your garbage, and how you determined you are to have a garbage-less surroundings.

Same time next year, we will be trooping again to the cemeteries, we just hope there will no longer be mountains of garbage out there.