talkin' trash

I have come to realize how paralyzed I’ve felt about not acting politically. How harmed I feel by the helplessness that has ensued because I have not acted on the many convictions that I have. The last eight years has compressed the very air I live in with perfuse and overwhelming sentiments that seemed to oppose all that resonated as good in me: regime change, promoting torture, gutting funds from education and welfare, gutting the effectiveness of the EPA, rolling back of environmental stewardship, support of financial recklessness in the name of economic growth, censorship of scientists, presidential and vice presidential lying to and manipulating the congress and thus we the people. And, to seal the lid on the pressure cooker: no one seemed to care or notice all these things, or notice that these things were, well, evil. The prevailing message was: don’t notice people stealing the very air you breathe or the water you drink or the earth we all depend upon for sustenance. Just keep buying, buying, and buying. People appeared to be only concerned with making a buck, or buying things cheaply and not caring about the consequences of their actions (including me). The power of stuff: cheap, fun goods are a powerful narcotic, not to mention the ability of easy money to spin your head.

I started armchair activism... I sign so many petitions every night, I risk carpel tunnel. But the issues out there are so overwhelming, rather than feeling I am doing something I come away with the feeling that these problems are so much bigger than me, so overwhelming- can I stop world hunger? Congo rape of women and children? Destruction of the rainforest? Clear cutting? Mountaintop removal? Destruction of salmon populations? Bludgeoning of baby seals? Puppy mills? And the list goes on and on. The depravation of humankind seems to know no boundaries. As Mark Twain said, “I am quite sure... I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices, nor caste prejudices, nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being- that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”

Alas, with the election of Barack Obama, the political tide seems to have turned. Our efforts at turning our society from one of consumer madness towards some sort of social/environmental responsibly one seems at least possible. From the ashes of my soul rises the phoenix of political will to participate in and initiate change for the better.

How did this happen? I have found a route, a pathway that resonates for me. I need to feel connected to my cause in an everyday tactile sense- I am bothered by so many things, but they seem so far away, so out of touch for me, so overwhelming. Yet everyday, in my own life and in my own actions, I am bothered by how I live. I am saddened and frustrated with making dinner because I have to throw away the plastic containers my “natural” chicken comes in, the plastic bags my frozen veggies come in, the bag the rice comes in, the empty milk container. Then washing and placing my recyclables in a container knowing there is only a small chance that they will indeed be recycled. I go to the bathroom and valuable nutrients for the earth are washed away with now wasted good water. Toilet paper, even if recycled, is bleached using dioxins and created using other toxic chemicals. Dental floss is thrown away. Cabinets full of medicines that cannot be returned. Throw away that old carpet, the old nasty dog chair, throw away those Styrofoam take out containers. Throw away the bags that the dog food was in, throw away the bottle caps, create mounds of recyclables. I find every time I go to the garbage and put something in I feel as though I am desecrating the earth, spitting on our ancestors that worked so hard to bring us here. In the natural world there is no trash. We are what we eat, experience, and been discarded. We like to throw things away because it appears that it then is not us. It “goes away.” But that is not true. The waste never goes away. It gets packed away for future generations to be poisoned by. We are creating dripping time bombs with our disposable lifestyle. We are blinded by the invisibility of the source and final resting place of our stuff....

What can be done? Well, we need to band together. We need to recognize that even though the advertisers, the manufacturers, the financial wheelers and dealers, tell us that buying, buying, buying is what is good for us because it is good for the economy, we need to realize that by buying incessantly without substantial change in manufacturing and waste management practices, we are destroying the world. We must stop this flow of garbage. What can be done? I have ideas, but it cannot be done alone. We must reject this lifestyle and seek out others. Does it have to be about stopping buying? Not necessarily, it has to be about forcing change to the options we are given. A choice between coke and pepsi is no choice at all. I have ideas. Many ideas.

Here are some ramblings my ideas:

We must seek out each other for ideas and support. Boycott bottled water or bottled anything if possible. To put together a coalition or non-profit that will create actions to return the garbage to those that created in and demand accountability. People must be responsible for the garbage they create and it is not the consumers fault. It is not our fault. To live outside the garbage stream is to live outside of society at this point. It is the major corporations that exploit our human frailties, exploit labor, exploit materials, and exploit our desire for ever more and cheaper stuff. The consumer culture was created by the manufacturers for profits; we must see how it is all connected. The destruction of our resources, the creation of more people with less money and less people with more money, the lack of political will. We are mesmerized by our toys. We must fight back against those that would steal our world in exchange for a few trinkets; we are all natives to be exploited by industry. Congress does not have the will to fight it. They are bought. We the people must fight back by returning the trash from whence it came. The new mantra: be responsible for your product.

for a limited time only

i am undertaking this new task- i wish to begin to change the world. tis ambitious, but i am tired of being tired and feeling all tied up and helpless. here is a new tool and political action at our grasp. the following is the beginning of an adventure in which i explore my own ideas about where i have come from and how i come to be where i am now. i reach out and hope to find others interested in sharing my ideals.

When I was in my twenties I had a stint as an activist. The time was the first Gulf War and surgical strikes were all the rage. I was infuriated and horrified that killing could become so antiseptic. But that issue wasn’t the only one that has captivated me. from the time I was little, it was not just the threat of nuclear war, or nuclear meltdown of three mile island but rather the slow poisoning and raping of our planet that has gripped my consciousness and led me to, I would love to say, a whirlwind of actions that have culminated in a dramatic shift in the way the world works today. But alas, you know that my name is relatively unknown and my activist self, after two events was bound up tight.

I recall my partner at the time being way bolder than I and set out to protest the 1^st Gulf War in a huge protest that was to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. I was busy and nervous, and so I stayed home. I thought he might not return from this particular adventure. However, he did finally return and with the most fantastic story. This part was on the news- they did manage to shut down the bridge and greatly disturb traffic. It was a raucous affair with cars honking, some for and some against the protest. But what was not on the news was this event: a rouge car freaked out and sped into the crowd of protestors. In the ensuing melee, my partner saw someone go over the side of the bridge. This was so disturbing to me that I don’t really remember any more of the particular details. But what was even more disturbing was the fact that I never heard about this painful development from the news. Not only was this particular disappearance was not reported by the news, but the whole event was only a small blip on the media page with hundreds of protesters reduced to a handful of mischievous disrupters of the commute. In fact, all the protests that I have ever attended have been grossly underreported. Most of the time, if it is stated that hundreds protested, it was usually closer to thousands. I was dismayed that the news people decided to only include a tiny blurb about the protest that temporarily shut down the Brooklyn Bridge! And that was true for the TV news and the print media. However, I felt traumatized and abandoned when there was no mention of the protestor who went missing. Up until that time, I had actually believed what I read in the papers and saw on TV was somehow a semi decent representation of what actually happened out there. Now I was mortified that the representation clearly only vaguely approximated reality.

The other event was one where I attended a meeting for organizing a march in NYC, around the same time. The city had been cagy about giving protest permits. The official places to protest were very circumscribed, say a corner of one block. And we wanted to make more of an impression. At this meeting there was a guy who looked different from the rest, and had never been to a meeting before. He had really short hair, but was wearing a fireman’s shirt, thus explaining the cop-like short hair. We talked about our plans for our various actions but the leaders were cagy about discussing what we were really going to do, (ideas that had been developed in different sub-committees). I didn’t really get it. So when this short-haired guy asked about our protest route, I told him what it was. I was glared at by the group leader. I thought he was being prejudiced against the short-haired guy. Well, we went to the march and were arrested right off the bat, at the appointed starting place because, well, we had a mole... guess who? Man, did I feel stupid.

These things should have been simply learning experiences, but my soul was more fragile. It was hard to swallow that simply letting your opinion be known by marching and protesting, you were viewed of as enemies of the state and people would actively try to stop you. It was really frightening. I became more involved in my personal life and let my political self languish in the prison of my fear.