A World Without People

Sometimes I wonder if I am Lilliput's alter ego or if she is mine.

During most days, on the clearest morning sky, I suit up for a day's work: I climb into my brown jean fabric overalls, I put on my wire framed glasses and pull a dust mask over my face and sling a grabber over my shoulder to pick up trash. Deep in my pocket is often a piece of crumbled notebook paper with the routes of my college neighborhood scribbled in ink. From there I weave through the sidewalks, cross intersections, and cut through alleyways of my college town picking up litter with several dumpsters being my final destinations.

And in these moments, I can't help but think about all of the different kinds of people who make the world go round. Not just the world from a throne on high. Not just the world from the view of those who see themselves as saviors of it. Not just the world from those who just want to watch it all burn down.

These are the moments I consider those who keep society running. From the bus driver who is the connector for people in one part of town to another, to the grocery store clerk who expertly packs my grocery bag from heaviest to lightest load, to the server whom I trust to relay my dietary restrictions to the cook, to the sanitation crew that wakes up at dawn to gather up all of the garbage we've collectively created and makes the neighborhood look pristine by midday.

For a long time, our society only considered firefighters and doctors to be heroes and our media glorified them in such a way making us all dream of one day being, well, heroes too.

Well, it turns out, the everyday hero deserve just as much praise. So here's a salute to all of those who gets the job done, no matter how messy and how grimy- YOU keep the flow going.

Later, no gator

Xu Chau