More lives have been saved by trash collection than all the pills and stainless steel combined. I find this comforting guidance as I wonder how to be relevant in our social political dumpster fire.
It has always been inconvenient to know that public scale contagion is unnecessary. And deeply annoying that this makes it immoral. Many deadly phenomena have patterns: vehicles injuries (hence seat belts and motorcycle helmets), the long gestation of cancer (hence smoking and environmental laws). Handwashing and food inspection is still really important.
Now, we see more and more clearly the long-term pathological effect of the micro-aggressions of being devalued all the time and having that be treated as normal in the toxic media soup we all slurp down. In recent decades we have learned to put these patterns on maps which makes the knowledge almost too clear for comfort (thank you Bill Davenhall!). Where to begin? Look on the map you are living on.
The whole point of “public” is that it includes everyone—everyone—and that all the relationships matter. The beginning of public health profession began with the Broad Street Cholera epidemic that everyone thought was caused by smelly air (miasma). A physician with a knack for data and a pastor who people trusted figured out it was being spread by a contaminated well. They took off the pump handle and that outbreak stopped. Cholera still breaks out whenever government forgets its duty to inspect the water.
What does that mean for you and me?
- Take the handle off the pump. We are already turning from the last election to the mid-term elections. It’s only the legislative branch but a start. The executive branch another two years. The courts will take a decade or two.
- Think like a sanitation engineer. Notice the people picking up your trash! These are our heroes and guides. Remember that Dr. King died on their behalf in Memphis teaching that all work is honorable if done in a spirit of service. I’ve left a prayer inspired by them at the end.
- Think about your own trash—the insults, divisions and aggressions done on your behalf and in your name. The political grenades tossed from “your side” at others. The actual bombs being dropped on people who will never forget that your tax dollars purchased them.
- Pick up what you can. Tom Peterson once told me of how he was evermore affected by reading about a Nobel prize winner who made a habit of cleaning up any restroom he visited. I think of that and often pick up the paper towels thrown by somebody else that missed the trash can. So minor! And there are so many other trashy aggressions that also missed the mark. Pick up your own trash. And why not others’?
Jesus was a trash collector sent to retrieve the human possibility. God starts every day dealing with the trash we have left to sort out. Some can be recycled, some buried. God never seems surprised or disheartened; never quits or gives up on the possibilities that all the damage and disrespect could yet turn toward healing, even beauty.
TC and I live on a tiny narrowboat in a canal at the bottom of a stunning meadow. The soil was too poor for proper farming, so it had become the village “tip” where people just dumped their broken stuff. In the British way, a “civic society” arose and decided to honor the queen by cleaning the tip up, planting a proper hedge of trees and nurturing the meadow that had always somehow stayed alive beneath all of it. It turns out that the little plot of land had never tasted pesticide or RoundUp. Beneath the trash it was pristine—organic across the centuries—just waiting for some responsible grown-ups to give it a chance.
You can’t grow a meadow or a people. But you can give them a chance.
Here’s a prayer about that: Collecting.
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That prayer is in the book God and the People: Prayers for a newer new awakening.
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