This is your trash, America

We were kicked out of a dumpster tonight. We’ve been kicked out before, but each time revives the ire within me and absolutely boils my blood. Two managerial white men with Hawaiian print shirts told us that we needed to leave or else they would call the cops. They “put” the trash there for a reason, they said. So we ask, “why don’t you donate it?” (Look at my pictures. Yeah they donate a lot, but they also throw out perfectly edible food. I’ve never gotten sick from it. It has fed multiple families. It needs to be cleaned, but you can eat it. Especially unnerving is the amount of meat we find. We raise and slaughter a life [in the most deplorable conditions] for nothing. I find whole chickens almost every night, but because I’m a vegetarian I don’t eat them. In ancient times people used to sacrifice animals to the gods. To whom do we sacrifice these animals?)

Their answer is robotic and expected. “It’s the law,” they say. “We could get sued.” Keep in mind, we’re digging in the trash. The laws are put in place to protect citizens from harm. This is no longer the case, it seems. Laws are here to protect corporations. But it is now in their hands. I now believe that if you are participating within the system then you are responsible for the system. No one is off the hook. Every single person in America can finger point. But we are all responsible for our choices and we all hold the blame. We are all reaping the rewards of this pathetically consumptive and entitled society. We are standing on the shoulders of the laborers.

The other night, Katie and I were talking about the fact that we are importing these foods from other countries only to throw it away. She said “America will one day have to account for the pain we’ve caused everyone else….in our own backyards.” Meaning, one day we will realize we are impotent to sustain ourselves.  Here in Southern California we import our water, rarely grow our own food, can’t (or won’t) transport ourselves without oil, and haven’t created a community in which we are mutually sustainable.

In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges writes:

“Individualism is touted as the core value of American culture, and yet most of us meekly submit, as we are supposed to, to the tyranny of the corporate state… Our corporate elite tell us government is part of the problem and the markets should regulate themselves – and then that same elite plunders the U.S. Treasury when they trash the economy. We insist we are a market economy, one based on the principles of capitalism and free trade, and yet the single largest sectors of international trade are armaments and weapons systems. There is a vast and growing disconnect between what we say we believe and what we do. We are blinded, enchanted, and finally enslaved by illusion.”

There is something majorly wrong here.  It is wrong that we throw so much away when people are starving.  Sometimes I feel like I am the only frog in the pot who notices the temperature increase.  In the aforementioned book, Chris Hedges reasons that the problem began, not from Democratic or Republican spending, but after WWII when we switched from a producing to a consuming culture.  We are Titanic plowing on toward an iceberg, only in this case the crash will  result in the awakening to the reality that we have been drowning all along.  The ship is sinking and we are putting our finest attire on credit card.  We must wake up.

We are living in an illusion of grandeur and corporation after corporation is telling us to keep up the facade.  The United States of America spends billions of dollars a day that we do not have.  Since WWII, half of everything the government has received in taxes has gone to military spending.  Our roads, schools, and hospitals will go to ruin while we go to war.  This won’t change, even when citizens are dying and starving, because the illusion must be maintained.  I’m not sure how to articulate this succinctly but I think that we are primed for a takeover.  As Huxley (and Postman) insinuated, we are truly amusing ourselves to death.  We have stopped asking “why?” and “who says?”

I began dumpster diving because I felt freeganism’s praxis was most consistent with its ethics.  If I believe there is too much waste, then what shall I do to stop it?  I am disinterested in belief without action.  I am disinterested in cool.   The day will come soon when we will all be held responsible for taking part in this waste.  When this time comes, when other countries stop buying our debt, the value of the dollar will fall and prices will skyrocket.  I fear that food-filled dumpsters will be locked,  and those in charge will bow to the corporate state instead of their consciences.  This future is not too far away.

So where does that leave us?  Action is necessary.  Taking account for our current reality is necessary.  It seems that our culture has begun to equate technological progress with moral progress.  This is not the case, and we are blinded by this fantasy.   If we think we have progressed morally, if we do not believe we are capable to do evil, then we are rendered impotent when violence and hysteria come to our doorsteps.  Science and technology will not save us because neither ask if something “ought” to exist.

But hope is not lost.  Vasily Grossman, a Jewish Soviet writer whose works were censored, was told that his books would not be published in “two hundred years.”  He was one of the first journalists to cover the concentration camps in which his mother was killed in Nazi Germany.  His books were eventually published posthumously.

Ultimately, love will triumph.  It always has and always will.  Art, music, dance, creativity, philosophy, poetry, self-sacrifice, generosity, resourcefulness, and a fierce dedication to current reality and a commitment to the community transcend fear.

Grossman writes in Life and Fate:

“I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man.  The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality  it can never be conquered.  The more stupid the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is.  Evil is impotent before it.  The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it.  This dumb blind love is man’s meaning.  Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil.  It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.  But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never be conquered.”