the Pope on pollution -- home remedies

One of the problems with urbanization the Pope’s encyclical cites is ‘visual pollution’, and I guess we all know what he means. Mostly it’s advertising, layers on layers, each billboard plastered on top of the last, faded enticements to buy stuff moldering down to dingy, dirty streets in all directions around any major city. Boarded up fast foods, fluorescent-lit gas pumps, the tumult of ambition and failure in tawdry heaps as we drive by soaking it in -- we can’t help it any more than we can help breathing the oily air. Does it dull the senses, how could it not?

Each and every sign, label, flyer is trying to get your attention, and it’s a frenzy, all after the ragged remnants of the average persons ability to even notice. A suggestion of cleavage on newsprint, on a turned page in a magazine, might arouse the nervous system enough to register a deal on tires, to realize a sudden need to purchase aftershave, and the competition for the momentary glance is cutthroat. Mostly we tune it out and look for escape, music so loud it overrides the chatter, preoccupation with the hand-held, and an hour in the park, a drive by the lake seems to help.

When I was young the ohio river would leave a nasty black line along its banks every time it went down an inch or two, but now there are fish, you can see to the bottom sometimes. There’s no longer a sign nailed to every tree on a drive in the country, thank you state legislature, and neighbors make an effort to de-uglify their part of town. Still, it’s a toxic environment for our perceptual net, the interface between us and what’s out there, so says the Pope. It’s worse in the slums, where every inch is covered with the belligerent badgering of payday loans and liquor stores, but it’s all over really.

People in densely populated, industrially polluted cities of the east sometimes go out in the street wearing surgical masks to try to filter out the large chunks, and it must help some. An antidote would be handy, when you get home, and it isn’t going to be a quickly fading football game selling beer and trucks. The remedy to apply is an apartment or house full of art, stable and friendly as any environment is going to be all day, a soothing, renewing bath for battered senses. Won’t fix everything, of course, but until the world becomes as beautiful as the Pope says it ought to be, it must help some.