A Dirty Little Secret
How would you define "clean"? The dictionary says it's anything "free from dirt and disease".
If someone asked you to clean a room, what would you do and how would you do it? Likely you would sweep, wipe or vacuum the prescribed area until it was satisfactorily
free from dirt.
When a surgeon prepares his hands for surgery he
cleans them with soap and with water until his hands are – yes, as defined –
free from disease.
It's the natural assumption that
cleaning something actually removes dirt from wherever it resides. By definition that's true, but the process of
cleaning is more about
moving dirt than it is about
re-moving it.
Think about that room you were asked to sweep up. You nicely corral all the dust bunnies and miniscule particles into one tidy little dirt pile. Then you
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A Dirty Little Secret
How would you define "clean"? The dictionary says it's anything "free from dirt and disease".
If someone asked you to clean a room, what would you do and how would you do it? Likely you would sweep, wipe or vacuum the prescribed area until it was satisfactorily free from dirt.
When a surgeon prepares his hands for surgery he cleans them with soap and with water until his hands are – yes, as defined – free from disease.
It's the natural assumption that cleaning something actually removes dirt from wherever it resides. By definition that's true, but the process of cleaning is more about moving dirt than it is about re-moving it.
Think about that room you were asked to sweep up. You nicely corral all the dust bunnies and miniscule particles into one tidy little dirt pile. Then you sweep the dirt into a dustpan. Then you empty the dustpan into a garbage can. Then eventually, when that pile creates its own dirty little mess, you discard that particular bag of garbage into a bigger pile of other garbage bags. When you have enough dirty bags collected, you transfer the entire pile into a landfill. Everything is cleaner now – everything that is, except the landfill - which now has a much larger collection of dust bunnies than it did a day ago. Basically you haven't cleaned anything, you've just moved dirt five different times.
So naturally, being this hygienic race as we are, we embark to clean up neighborhoods; we clean graffiti; we clean greasy walls; we clean dirty dishes and we clean oil-stained driveways. When all is said and done we are left with this invigorating sensation of a living world much cleaner than it was before we started. Furthermore we are convinced that, given enough time and resources, we will eventually rid the planet of all the dirt and all the oil and all the dust bunnies it has to offer - as if each individual mess is but one little mound in one little room in this huge house we call Earth.
I suppose we're just good at moving piles. It's what I call The Leaf Blower Effect. I take this mess I see before me, start the motor and, before I know it, it's my neighbor's problem. I am clean yet it is he who is now dirty. It's like passing karma via stains and smudges.
The incredible part comes in the cyclical nature of this process. Theoretically, if we did actually liberate each room from all its dirt and disease we would never ever need to clean it again. This huge assembled mass of dirt in the world would all be pushed into a corner of the globe to be adroitly swept up by some gargantuan galactic dust pan.
That would work fine if dirt wasn't so darned (a) migratory and (b) infinite.
Floors, once swept, always require more sweeping. No matter where you put it and how you hide it, dirt always finds its way back to where it came from. And you think pigeons that have a legendary homing instinct…
This means that whatever garbage we have with us now has, realistically, always been with us and will always be with us. Nothing, barring a collision with an errant meteor or an attack from another planet, will add any extra dust bunnies to our mix from an outside source. The amount of dirt we have is the same as it's always been. It's like smashing a dinner plate on the bathroom floor. No matter how many pieces it breaks into and how many pointy shards get stuffed behind the toilet bowl there will always be but one broken plate in the bathroom.
The radical implications of the New Reality of Clean are absolutely mind-blowing. Not only does it put the whole concept of personal hygiene in severe jeopardy but it also effectively de-claws every dire environmental warning ever given to the human race. Mother Earth, after all, isn't becoming more polluted. She's just moving the furniture around a little.
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