waste

Wastage is global. Garbage bins outside of restaurants pile up with good food that has no value because somebody has touched it. Half a pizza is not worth half as much as a pizza; it is garbage.
This is irrational, but the greater waste is that which has never been: the human wastage on city streets, where intelligence and creativity are abused in menial labour. A massive loss of thought.
Life is dedicated to survival.
Protein has a price tag and remains in the butcher’s.
Brains atrophy.
Where there might have been a doctor, there is a shoe shiner. Where there may have been a young student with a book, there is a boy sheltering from the world under a newspaper he cannot read. What art? What literature? What medical breakthrough? What bridge is lost? This is the great waste of things, and people, that never were.