Talking Trash

Until moving to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, my trash had always been removed by a garbage man. They were always men. We call them sanitation workers, today and women may have joined their ranks –but I’m not sure.

I never knew one as an individual except briefly on Long Island’s North Fork where a garbage man collected our trash in the small rural community where I summered. He liked to talk, share local gossip and would linger with his customers, chatting, before moving on. Scruffy, perhaps, but locals said he owned half of the North Fork.

Living on the Eastern Shore, I first took my trash to the dump. It was challenging, planning my runs, and storing trash judiciously to keep it from animals. It became a bother. A neighbor with garbage pickup invited me to split his bill and I could then bring garbage to his house to be removed.  We talked trash and struck a deal, and again, a garbage man served me. Still, I didn’t know who the man was.

For performing such a critical service, why are sanitation workers so invisible and under recognized?

It’s because the garbage man’s task – the word garbage itself is pejorative – has been framed negatively, unlike, say the banker or the philanthropist who provide communities with things they value, like money. The garbage man, on the other hand, rids us of what we don’t want, but what we also find repulsive.  It’s a dirty job and I think the sanitation worker’s task and person are unfairly disparaged because of trash’s unpleasant associations.

We treat our own personalities similarly.  The character traits that we find repugnant in ourselves, we hope remain hidden from others while secretly wishing someone could just rid us of them. To that end, therapists and analysts are frequently consulted – but we keep such consultations secret. Our more attractive attributes – the ones socially admired - we are more than willing for others to acknowledge. We showcase these characteristics regularly.

Sanitation workers perform three critical services: insuring community health, contributing to an attractive environment, while helping us to maintain our dignity as humans. It’s worth noting that the community’s infrastructure is severely compromised when a waste removal system is not in place. Without sanitation workers, even those community servants to whom we attribute status and honor couldn’t function.

Having said this, for all the years that I’ve enjoyed garbage pickup, it never once occurred to me to give twenty dollars to the worker at Christmas as I normally do for the mail carrier or for the guy that delivers our paper. Considering the magnitude of the service the sanitation worker performs, I’m embarrassed to admit this.

National awareness days are growing exponentially. They honor those of society who serve us well. Why not initiate a “Sanitation Workers Awareness Day.” It would be a start. Next might come bumper stickers that read, “Have you hugged a sanitation worker, today.”  A tougher sell, to be sure, but it might break the discriminatory view we’ve held of those who’ve faithfully rid us of what we find disagreeable and don’t want, thereby freeing us up to seek what we find mo

Being Bugged

           

We can’t live without them. Some, we can’t live with at all. They constitute ninety five percent of the earth’s living organisms. I mean bugs. They’re everywhere. Shore dwellers are painfully aware of that.

           

 Bacteria are often referred to as bugs – they’re not - but if I did include them as bugs and could stack both up like pennies, they would extend a trillion light-years into space. In short, we Homo sapiens are a tiny minority on this planet.  Considering we’re just a handful, we’ve way overestimated our importance.

           

From Biblical times, human kind, now some seven billion of us, has regarded itself – and particularly its males - as the glory of God’s creation; a little lower than the angels but above women and well above bugs. Some say it’s the gift of our thumbs and our self-reflexive capacities and certain body parts that’s given us first class status on the planet but I question this.  God did not impart thumbs, consciousness and select body parts to us for status. They’re assigned for function.  I think we’re wired to be co-creators with God. Whether by inventing wheels or computers or giving birth we practice our divine attributes and become co-creators.  Our self-reflexive abilities allow us to wonder at nature’s majesty, even to weep at sunsets, and also to have compassion.

           

I think we’ve used our divine attributes poorly.

Almost worldwide, and for eons women have been regarded as a minority, not because of numbers, but for the access to opportunities men have denied them. African-Americans have been a numerical minority here but like women, have had opportunities denied them by a majority.  It’s really a guy thing that blacks and women have been a minority for so long. Possessing status and power as men have for so long is like having a drug habit; you never have enough and you’ll do anything to get more.

Majorities and minorities are especially hot topics today.  In the year 2043, Asians and Hispanics are predicted to exceed the white population. Some whites are nervous about this since they know how they once treated minorities.

Minorities, however, may act as oppressively as majorities. Scientists believe that our human activity is responsible for the extinction of an increasing number of earth’s species, including bugs.  In politics our federal government was partially shut down for seventeen days by a small minority called the Tea Party.  This bugged both Democrats and Republicans alike.

A close look at bugs, ants and bees is instructive. Majority groups like these act wisely. They work for the good of all. Yes, their queens do enjoy incredible power and status. However, what defines these groups is cooperation, using everyone’s gifts for the common good.

Best we learn, not from those bugs making spectacular demonstrations by their sheer numbers, like swarms of locusts that waste everything in their wake, but those insects, like bees, that hum along in quiet cooperation, like the world’s peacemakers do. They work night and day, seeking cooperative solutions.  Like so many bugs, we rarely see them at work.