People VI: Moving stuff

As human beings, we need to carry things. It's the one thing that defines us as intelligent beings.

I know that animals carry stuff too. The lion carries to the den the carcass of the antelope it just killed. Birds are carrying in their beaks the juicy worms that would feed the young ones. They also carry straws when building the nest. Also in their beak. Beavers are carrying whole logs. God knows how they get the power and intelligence to just do that.

Still, humans developed in time different contraptions to carry their things. We got to the point where we are developing rockets in order to move to Mars while in some parts of the world (like mine), people are still breaking their backs in order to transport stuff they need.

^{Look! Fans on the fields so the damn cows won't feel hot...}

In my country, we still use our backs lots of times. Especially the normal folk. They could move mountains, bag by bag, that's how trained they are. Centuries upon centuries of unmechanised work transformed our fellows into very strong individuals. If you go during the weekend in the flea markets organised all over the country and you get there early in the morning in the area dedicated to the live animals, you will see people carrying stuff on their backs mostly. God forbids that you get in the way of one of them. With one hand placed powerfully in their waist, in order to support the weight of the bag on their shoulder, head down in the ground so they can switch their centre of weight, they would go like bulls to their parked vehicle. If you get in their way they won't see you so you'd better watch out because you will cause a crash that will bring down the heavy bag they hold upon the shoulder and that's it: no water will be able to wash away the curses you will get.

^{Recently, due to the stuff shortage all over the country, we have Asians; they also carry stuff on their backs}

In Romania we developed different mechanisms to transport this kind of things. Carts (on two or four wheels), different bags or wagons, either pulled by human or animal force. We carry all sorts of things that maybe they are not supposed to be carried that way. Like gas tanks or even oxygen tanks if the person you are looking at is totally insane. Seeing a cart pulled by two horses is nothing weird or out of the ordinary in my country. Damn it! I think that instead of seeing less of them on the main roads we are seeing more. So somehow the number of carts that are roaming the public roads is getting higher and higher. On top of that, as a car driver, you have to be careful, at least during the nights, for the sides of the road. It may be that you will meet pedestrians through dark places, carrying things on their back, or pulling small carts behind them and you have to be able to pass around them. Don't hit them! though they may be looking like things, they are humans.

^{There are places in Romania that don't have the infrastructure to get natural gas through the pipes. For those places, the individual gas tank cart is the solution}

Of course, the fact that we are still recycling mostly individually transformed our backs. There are people that are roaming the streets or the garbage dumps in order to find metals or plastic to carry it to the recycling points. Because of this, both women and men developed in time differently. It looks to me that because of the way they carry those immense bags on their shoulders, their backs have arched in time. It's that kind of evolutionary thing that happens to beings when they evolve.

It's a hard life collecting plastics. Collecting metals is already a thing of a newly developed mafia: the "iron" mafia", that group of people that control other large groups of people in order to gather metals from a country that was developed on iron. They are breaking their and their horses' backs under the weight of Aluminium, Iron and sometimes Copper (when they are stealing the latter).

^{Extracting abandoned plastic and moving it towards the collection point, on the back. Beat that job...}

It's not an easy life and for sure it's not a pleasant one.

People have to carry things in order to put food on the table. Fuck it! Sometimes that food that you have to put on the table has to be carried. Either from the groceries store or directly from the garden.

We are like ants. We collect things. But we don't need all the things we collect. And we don't use all the things that we carry. That's why we need people to carry away what we don't use. That's how new means of living develop. That's how society moves forward...

At least that's what the poem said.

But...

"ARE WE REALLY MOVING FORWARD?"

  Posted also on my blog www.ddma.ro, a place on the world wide web where I'm trying to promote Steemit, my writings and my country. In that order. I post through the @steempress-io plugin and I make my life easier (writing and formatting in Wordpress is much easier than on steemit.com or busy.org)