42 SAtYA May 2006
This is happening right now. Govern-
Truth Against Trash
By Pattrice Jones
E
very day I ask myself why?
I live on a dead-end rural road.
Each week more litter material-
izes on the roadside. Fast food
bags and wrappers appear and disappear,
disintegrating with every rain. Waxy cups
linger longer among the wild weeds. Soda
bottles and beer cans move in to stay,
permanently defacing the landscape.
This road is not a thoroughfare. Rush
hour for us is three cars and a school bus
within 30 minutes. The friendly UPS
guy certainly isn’t the one dropping beer
bottles into our drainage ditches. It’s not
the mail carrier or the school bus driver
or the farm supply truckers either. It’s got
to be the people who live here.
Watching dog Dandelion snuffle a
coffee cup or cat Dodici delicately step
over sticky liquid, I struggle to imagine
the impulse to toss trash out a car window
anywhere, much less on your own street.
Why would anybody want to do that? What
does it feel like to do?
Could it feel like freedom to spit in
the eye of the crying Indian from the
Keep America Beautiful campaign? Does
it feel deliciously wicked to defile Mother
Nature? Or does it feel clean, like shedding
something sinful, to get that garbage out
of your car?
Or does it feel like nothing at all?
Disposable Bodies
Dandelion and Dodici themselves were dis-
cards. Dandy was dropped off at a shelter
when she grew too big and boisterous for
people who wanted a very different sort of
dog. Dodici was left like litter in a carrier
on the side of a highway.
We kill three or four million unwanted
dogs and cats every year here in the U.S.
Meanwhile, more than 200 million male
chicks are trashed annually—often liter-
ally thrown into dumpsters where they
suffocate or starve—by an egg industry
that has no economic use for them.
Worldwide, about a million newborn
babies are murdered each year by parents
Knowing things can change you.
who have no economic use for females.
According to Amnesty International, more
than 60 million girls and women are “miss-
ing” from the world right now thanks to sex-
selective abortion and female infanticide.
Also among the missing are the
girls and women who disappear into the
global sex trade every day. Here in the
U.S., runaway children fleeing abuse and
“throwaway” teens who have been aban-
doned or told to leave home are the ‘fresh
blood’ upon which the prostitution and
pornography industries depend.
Here and elsewhere, rape and murder
are occupational hazards for workers in
these flesh trades. Both perpetrators and
police tend to consider sex workers to be
“unrapeable”—as if their bodies are already
so polluted that they cannot be defiled. Once
sold, according to this logic, the body no
longer truly belongs to the prostitute. She’s
forever lost the right to say “no.”
Mass murders of women who were (or
were mistakenly believed to be) prostitutes
in British Columbia, Guatemala and Mexico
have made the news in recent years. But it’s
the everyday attrition everywhere that leads
some experts to believe that murder is the
top cause of death among prostitutes. Facile
post-feminist talk about women empower-
ing themselves through erotic dancing at
high-class clubs aside, the fact is that most
prostitutes have been raped at least once and
everybody in the street sex trade knows at
least one women who’s gone missing.
The dangers are even greater for the
two million women and children traf-
ficked into servitude in brothels every year.
Raped daily by many men, these women
and children endure unspeakable physical
and psychic anguish that often ends only
with death. Like egg factory owners tossing
“spent” hens into wood chippers, the gangs
that run the brothels in which women
and children are enslaved do not hesitate
to kill any prostitute whose upkeep is no
longer profitable. Those who aren’t killed
may die anyway due to untreated HIV or
other sexually transmitted disease.
black university. One day I met a student
ments routinely launch rescue missions
for even a handful of hostages. Why isn’t
anybody rushing to rescue these children
and women? Why haven’t we who shun
sweatshop products also worked to shut
down the travel agencies that ferry our
fellow citizens to sex tourism destinations?
Why haven’t we who free hens from bat-
tery cages also staged open rescue actions
to expose the enslavement of women in
brothels in our own backyards? Can it
be that we too see captive prostitutes as
unsalvageable human refuse?
From the Dump to the Salvage Yard
Worldwide, 250 million children live on
the streets, 115 million children never
have stepped inside a classroom, and a
third of all children in Africa live with
hunger every day.
From the ranks of such cast-off,
orphaned and impoverished children come
hundreds of thousands of child soldiers
in dozens of countries. Captured, sold or
recruited into rag-tag armies, boys and
girls are forced to commit horrific acts that
leave them estranged from their families
and convinced of their own venality. They
often become the most ruthless killers of
all, deployed to commit atrocities when
they are not used as cannon fodder in wars
of attrition.
The same dynamics twist the psyches
of abused children everywhere. Abusers
commonly force or trick children into
hurting others, thereby convincing them
that the badness is within themselves.
They may grow up believing them-
selves to be poisonous or unworthy of love.
They may consequently treat themselves
or others like trash.
We commonly speak of the “stolen
innocence” of abused or exploited chil-
dren. Innocent means blameless. What
might a child who has lost his or her
innocence be? Guilty?
When we say that children have lost
their innocence, aren’t we relegating them
to the realm of trash, treating them like
spoiled produce good only for the compost
heap? Aren’t we using the same logic that
leads us to kill rather than rehabilitate the
dogs and roosters who have been tricked
and twisted by fans of animal fighting?
Abused and exploited children are marked
by the things that have been done to them,
the things they have done, and what this has
taught them about people and the world.
Nonetheless they retain their animal
innocence. Habits of belief and behavior
developed defensively can be changed
through a long hard process of recycling
undertaken in an atmosphere of safety
and empathy. The first step is seeing the
salvageable goodness underneath the
debris of anger and fear.
The Tao of Trash
I used to live across the street from a crack
house on a block where the Neighborhood
Watch was losing the war on drugs. There,
the drifting plastic bags and candy wrap-
pers seemed a natural part of the cityscape.
I grew organic vegetables in the backyard
and unsuccessfully sought to protect the
abused children next door.
Then, as now, my house-proud neigh-
bors thought I was crazy or lazy for not
mowing my lawn.
The only white person on the block,
I was acutely aware that the words “white
trash” are often associated with weedy yards
like mine. More than once, I allowed myself
to be shamed into paying someone to waste
fossil fuel trashing perfectly good plants.
Like many people, I struggle with
shame. A throwaway teen myself, I had been
luckier than most but had become entangled
for a time in sex work, in the course of which
I was sexually assaulted. Years later, as the
weeds were rising and the neighbors were
once again casting reproachful glances at
me in my garden, I sought solace in chapter
13 of the Tao Te Ching, which talks about
accepting disgrace willingly.
Crouching amidst the denigrated
plantain and pokeweed, my mind drifted
to the rest of that chapter, which talks
about loving the world as your self so that
you can be trusted to care for all things.
Suddenly, I saw the flip side of the golden
rule: as long as I exempted aspects of myself
from compassion, I could not be trusted.
Always, there would be the question: Who
else is exempt? Always, there would be the
risk of dumping the despised aspects of
myself onto somebody else.
I now teach speech at a historically
May 2006 SAtYA 43
in the library to talk about why he was
missing class and not doing his work. He
explained without self pity that he came
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Later, he told the class about an incident
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Refusing to be Refuse
We’re all tainted by the things that have
been done to us and the things that we’ve
done. Our bodies are contaminated by
pollutants that poison our bloodstream
and corrupt our DNA. Our minds are full
of received ideas and our hearts are clogged
with accumulated hurt. We spew waste into
the waters and shoot junk into space.
It all goes back to treating the earth
like dirt and animals (including ourselves)
as if they were inert. It stops when we see the
world as a quivering living thing and realize
that we are a part of—not apart from—the
breathing biosphere that sustains us all.
It’s time to go dumpster diving within
ourselves. It’s time to refuse to be garbage,
to find new uses for old feelings and recycle
our energy into effective activism.
We’ve got to see and salvage the animal
innocence in ourselves and each other. If
former child soldiers and sex slaves can
do it—and they do—we can too.
There’s no time to lose. Every year,
more species of plants and animals end up
in the dustbin of history. Every day, more
children are thrown away. What will you
pick up off the roadside today? n