Everybody who goes through rehab knows. Everybody who has ever cleaned a toilet knows. If you don’t keep cleaning up, if you don’t deal with the ration of ugly shit we get and make every day, it piles up and gets really disgusting and harder and harder to remove. We have to keep cleaning up.
But what disappears first from government spending when people refuse to raise taxes? Maintenance. Keeping things clean and safe. So the ugly shit piles up.

Bacteria grow in uninspected food. Cars fall into sinkholes caused by ancient infrastructure. Old gas lines leak and houses explode. Lead leaches into the water and stunts the brains of thousands of children. It costs a lot to fix the damage. If we refuse to pay the price of keeping things clean and safe, eventually we will pay a much higher price. And some of the damage can never be fixed.

So let’s clean up our shit as we go. That will motivate us to create less shit to begin with. Plastic, for example: if it won’t biodegrade, we need to stop manufacturing it.

Trillions of pieces of garbage now orbit our planet, gyre on the oceans, choke the fish and poison the birds. Yet we keep making more stuff that has such a short useful life, if it gets used at all, that we might as well ship it straight from the factory to the landfill and save everybody a lot of time and trouble.

Emotional shit piles up too. Everybody who’s ever had therapy knows that. We manufacture useless crap like anger, resentment, envy, and shame, and pile it up inside. Eventually everything inside us gets disgusting and we can’t stand ourselves any more. We have to learn to clean up as we go.

Same thing with nations. We do each other dirty, and the small harms pile up. Eventually we go to war, which does more harm than anything. The residue from that damage leads to future wars. We have to clean up as we go. Notwithstanding the egos of our leaders and the pride of our ideologues, we have to apologize, make restitution, and as far as possible, repair what we have broken. Maintaining peace can be expensive, but it’s cheaper than war.