TheThirdRider

My former supervisor grew up in Romania around the same time. He said that in school he was required to recycle a certain number of clear, green and brown bottles and if they couldn't find them his family would buy them and dump them out to meet the recycling quota. Later he was in the military and at one point they were ordered to pick up and move tomatoes from one field to another to 'meet' inspection quotas. The tomatoes the agriculture minister was inspection were planted hours before by him and his squad, and 20 rows in there were no tomatoes on the plants. They pretended to pick them from boxes. He mentioned other similar things that were just so against common sense I had trouble imagining it.

Besides wanting to share that I was curious if you saw policies that were similarly totally against common sense but no one spoke out against out of fear.

It sounds so strange I find it hard picturing myself there, it's almost like Alice in Wonderland, it's so topsy turvy. Like you said, surreal. He said for school he had to collect medicinal plants and they had to collect a certain amount. But they lived in a city and the best they could do was willow bark from the park for willow tea, so they would often have to go to the corner store, buy some herbs, put it in a paper bag and bring it in to school so that it could be resold at the same store.

Would there be any way to point out that gathering herbs in a city is just not practical without being arrested or at least labeled a decenter?