Mexico and Melbourne
Mexico city
“Why, why are you doing this to me?” the little green pea shouted while being tossed about by the spoon. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Do not dare to jump out of the frying pan” said the cook, “can you not see that I am giving you flavor?”
More than 20 million Mexican peas are tossed about in 4.5 million privately owned cars and one of the largest most sophisticated underground transport systems in the world daily. And by any and many other means people can, and for what?
During the course of its history, Mexico (today’s Mexico’s territory) has experienced dramatic shifts in population. At the time of the Spanish colony in the early 1500s the population has been estimated to have been around 20 million. By the 1600s however barely 1 million remained, the result of deadly European diseases hitherto unknown in the Americas and the cruel treatment of the indigenous populations by the Spaniards. Not till 1940 Mexico reached the population level it had in 1519 but by 1970 Mexico’s population stood at nearly 50 million, almost two and a half times its pre-World War II population. Today Mexico’s population stands at more than 100 million.
Many different explanations can be put forward in order to understand the exorbitant population rate growth of Mexico City. The perceived need to bring Mexican economy from one based on a predominantly rural society into a more competitive industrialized one by the centralist government policies of the 1930s to the early 1990s mostly conducted by the Partido Revolusionario Institucional (PRI), and by an ever increasing economical external pressure imposed by global economies of more recent times, and by the advancement on preventive diseases and improvement sanitation conditions world wide for instance. The fact remains that no picture can be large enough to ever comprehend the sheer perception of abandonment felt by millions of people living there. According to NGO studies conducted in Canada, USA and Mexico, half of Mexico’s population roughly 50million Mexicans earn in average 750 USA dollars per year. And who is to be blamed for that?
There simply can not exist a long enough film to accommodate for a story that long, Mexico city was once a proud city, a clean city a city whose gods had not forsaken, today if my memory does not let me down Mexico spends 10% of its gross income in maintaining the sewage and fresh water systems of Mexico City alone. Under the Volcanoes Mexico City is still an amazing, an enchanting city, it is called the City of Palaces and its people can be seen diligently celebrating fiestas all around to the now mostly Christian gods through the year. Mexico City is the foot of the largest monster the world has ever seen, and on its way people, mountains and energy is its fodder.
Melbourne city
At Jolimont the doors opened allowing passengers to access the train, about three carriages away a young man jumped out running, from were I sat I followed him, he made it to the rubbish bin and dropping in whatever it was in his hand he run back to the carriage and he jumped back in. Doors slammed locked.
In twenty years I have spent in living in different cities of Europe and commuting to Mexico back and forth I do not recall to have ever experienced any similar instance. I do not recall another city as beautifully Clean as Melbourne, There is good rubbish and bad rubbish, and I guess the vortex of the turbulence we experience world wide had to have footing some place, yet the other foot is remains invisible…..
Waste collection
Happy rubbish
Good rubbish
