Broken bottles set fire to Russia

Millions of green bottle shards scattered in the forest formed a giant magnifying glass that collected sunlight and intensified it. It turned out to be an all-Russian fire

This is not a spontaneous fire, this is a man-made fire. It was created and created by those who throw garbage in the forest. Mountains and patches of this garbage are everywhere. And there is nowhere to go from it. At least get in the car and go to the wilderness of some Otradnensky forestry ...

This is not a spontaneous fire, this is a man-made fire. It was created and created by those who throw garbage in the forest. Mountains and patches of this garbage are everywhere. And there is nowhere to go from it. Even if you get in a car and go to the wilderness of some Otradnensky forestry, all the same, these terrible pictures will also get you there: a lyrical pond overgrown with duckweed and a car oil canister that someone threw away from the shore.

I avoid calling this someone human. A couple of years ago, I wrote a short text for Novaya Gazeta about the impudent, blatant, boorish littering of the country that is taking place before our eyes and called in it the one who litters the country, briefly and clearly: a pig-goat. Pig - because he lives in the mud, loves the mud, creates the mud, creates downright apotheosis of the mud. Goat - because it is stupid and stubborn and inaccessible to any words. I’ll drink vodka at the edge of the forest and bang bottles against trunks, I’ll grunt chips and throw wrappers under birch trees, I’ll pour liters of sweet chemical swill into my belly and throw the empty container under the bushes. This is how he lives.

That text was not published, apparently, the topic seemed small to the editor. Of course, the garbage in the forest is not like the elections to the Duma or corruption in the highest echelons of power. Well, trash. Well, they quit. Unpleasant, of course. But why write about it, and even with such passion? Against the background of big politics and global problems of financial markets, a bottle broken on a birch tree is nothing. But only this summer, broken bottles, like an artifact in a bad game, joined forces and set fire to Russia.

We live in a garbage country. We can't digest what we consume, and that's why garbage is everywhere. On the football field near Moscow, where I played as a child, a new generation of football players leave cans, bottles, crumpled packages, crushed packs after the game. On another field near Moscow, where I play now, all the same waste products of a pig-goat are scattered around the cultural benches that were once installed by someone. He quits where he eats. He throws where he drinks. And when he leaves the place, in his narrow, tiny brain there is no thought that he consumed not beer, vodka and chips, but another piece of the country. Spat on, littered, burned landscape ceases to be alive and habitable.

A new era is beginning when material goods will not be in short supply - but China and Taiwan will produce them as much as they like! - and cleanliness and silence. This will be the true value of life, accessible only to people in power and millionaires. They, the chosen ones of the new age, will enjoy the clear banks of the streams in their estates and the gentle silence of sunsets, surrounded by two rings of personal protection, while all of us, the rest, will sit huddled together on the littered beaches, smelling of gasoline, and startle in nightmares when a pig goat starts a loud drunken karaoke from his fifth or twentieth floor.

The first perishes purity, the second silence. In an age when the progress of technology has reached the point where two hundred dollars can buy Jericho trumpets, our cities and towns are turning into places of noise orgies. You can dismiss this - well, what a topic, what a petty topic! - but only the consequences of this small topic will inevitably be large. And unexpected. No one could have imagined that broken bottles would set fire to Russia. So today, no one can even imagine what the sound littering of the atmosphere will lead to. Perhaps, at one fine moment, the number of domestic conflicts with the use of auxiliary means will increase five times: axes, cleavers. So people will fight for silence. Or maybe all the birds of our middle zone in one day will suddenly take off together and leave the country, littered with the sound of millions of tape recorders turned on at full power, radio and karaoke. And then we will open our mouths and be surprised, as it should be for fools who do not know what they are doing: “Well, never mind! Our birds have emigrated!”

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev wandered with a hunting rifle through the Kaluga forests and then, with precise and restrained tenderness, wrote about the beauty of these places. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy from his home among the Tula forests sent his passionate messages to all of Russia about how to live. These people did not even dare to think that it is possible, as if through a rotten floor, to fall through all the concepts of reason, beauty and morality - down into the dullness of decay. If they, these honorable people, would today see a pig-goat with his ruminant selfishness, a pig-goat throwing garbage under his feet, frightening birds and neighbors with the roar of music, driving at night through sleeping areas on a rattling motorcycle, setting fire to forests with cigarettes, letting firecrackers against the background of trembling from the fear of the fire of the villages, turning more and more new spaces of the once idyllic-clean Russia into a garbage heap, they would have recoiled in horror from this picture.

We developed, developed, and now we have developed to the signs in cemeteries: “Don’t throw garbage!” I saw such a sign both on the huge Vagankovsky in Moscow, and on the small rural one, near the church in the village of Yashkino. Everywhere is the same. This terrible, stupid pig-goat walks everywhere and sticks his garbage already into the graves of our loved ones. And do not be surprised if the day comes, and we wake up, look out the window and see how in the air smelling of fires, bitter from poison, filled with broken melodies, caravans of non-migratory birds stretch to the borders, and after them, rising from littered graves, mournful the shadows of Dr. Chekhov, Count Leo Tolstoy and our other offended ancestors are leaving in a procession from the country.