Living in the Shadow of a Garbage Society

My mother loves telling this story: one Sunday when I was perhaps four or five, the pastor asked the assembled children what jobs they wanted when they grew up. I reportedly announced into a live microphone: “I want to be a garbageman!” Once the laughter subsided, the pastor asked why I’d aspire to such a job. “I want a job that helps people,” I supposedly said,” and garbagemen help people by removing their trash!”

It’s easy, from an adult perspective, to laugh at the childlike logic implicit in that statement. Lord knows I do. But revisiting that child’s reasoning, I really appreciate the underlying reasoning. It reflects the precepts of mutualism, responsibility, and trust which underlie a working society: when somebody has a problem, and I have the capacity to alleviate that burden, I arguably have a moral responsibility to do so.

That responsibility underlies traditional moral paradigms like The Good Samaritan. It isn’t enough to feel sympathy for that broken body lying beside the road; the Samaritan must lift the bloodied man onto his donkey, transport him to safety, and purchase the care that man requires. I must solve another’s burden by taking it onto myself physically. I must throw others’ garbage into the truck before it can be removed.

Considering this raises another question, though: does that really help? When faced with an acute situation, I can assume the other’s burdens temporarily, sure. I can remove their accumulated store of garbage. How many times can I do this, though, before finally looking into why their household produces so much trash? Eventually I must acknowledge that removing and landfilling their garbage permits them to keep producing trash, and that’s a problem.

Don’t misunderstand me. I know and appreciate the helping motivation. Though I never became a garbageman, I stuck with teaching despite the dismal pay and no advancement opportunities because I believed I was doing good. But I remember, multiple times, walking students through the academic process and realizing I could do nothing for them, because they’d been abandoned by parents, academia, capitalism, and modern society years earlier.

A Sunday School illustration of the
Good Samaritan. Click to enlarge.

Most people probably don’t produce massive quantities of household garbage from malice or negligence. But they’re pressed for time, lacking resources, and have material needs. I doubt most people would purchase the things they’re most likely to throw away—flimsy clothing, food packaging, and countless stacks of paper—if they didn’t have an unjust system requiring them to buy food, clothes, and everything else at unequal terms.

It’s tempting to believe we can take others’ suffering away without taking it on ourselves. And sometimes, certainly, we can; it’s possible, sometimes, to simply remove and discard others’ suffering, But not very often. The garbageman, in removing others’ refuse, must first lift and throw it himself, and even when the waste is removed and landfilled, the reek of garbage, literal and metaphorical, never entirely washes off.

Please forgive the overextended garbage metaphor. My point remains: I can help people by assuming their burdens, by removing the detritus that life forces them to produce, and by trying, however ham-handedly, to heal their wounds. Or I can help by finding the reasons why they’re forced to be wasteful, hurting, and generally disadvantaged. I can fix their problems when they’re acute, or before they even become problems.

Unfortunately, we’ve accepted that only helping individuals when their problem is acute actually counts as helping. Addressing the injustice that creates acute problems is routinely dismissed as “political,” disdained as partisan interference. Recall the Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara’s famous quote: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

The conditions that filled people’s lives with garbage, however, weren’t apolitical. Our economics, shared values, and hierarchies didn’t just happen, despite the libertarian myth; these conditions are created and reinforced by legal systems. As conservatives like reminding us whenever America’s southern border returns to mass consciousness, “we’re a society of laws.” That doesn’t just mean to shut up and obey, it means laws, written and unwritten, create society.

So yes, in short, I could help people by removing the trash their modern lives force them to accumulate. I could martyr myself by accepting the moral judgment and pervasive physical reek that come with being a garbageman. Or I can rise up against a system that encourages people to hoard things and create waste. The latter is more disdained, but much more effective.