The Cradle of Civilization

Displaced people in Iraq are reduced to sifting through the trash to find food and “eke out a living,” Reuters reports this morning. IRIN had the above photo on file, so clearly this is nothing new.

Yesterday, while getting dressed to hit the gym before work, I grabbed a black t-shirt with the neck cut out from my drawer. It wasn’t the top I was looking for, but as I put it back, I noticed the design on the front. “Stop the War Against Iraq,” it read, next to the doe-eyed and somber face of a little girl in pig tails. I bought the shirt in 2000—long before the current invasion—to protest military sanctions, a.k.a. the “silent war,” on Iraq. A few months later, I got on a plane with a bunch of other Americans and headed off to Baghdad to commemorate the tenth anniversary of what we call the first Gulf War and what the people I met in Iraq referred to as “the American Aggression”.

It was an informative trip. A radical and perhaps misguided form of protest—defying the sanctions by traveling to Iraq with medical supplies, conducting what we called an objective fact-finding mission in a country whose government handlers don’t allow for such unobstructed investigations—but an informative trip nonetheless. In the end, a large part of why I went to journalism school was to learn a less subjective methodology for my fact finding than traveling on international delegations with clear political slants.

What I think about most often, though, were the college students I met while visiting a university. I look back at the photos we took together and marvel at the fact that, aside from my dorky name-tag, you’d be hard pressed to say which one was the visiting American and which were the Baghdad students.

That was six years ago. I wonder where they are now.

This is a blog about trash.

This is a blog about Oscar the Grouch. It’s about the smoke of burning trash piles wafting through every developing country in the world. It’s about the billions of dollars a year spent exporting garbage from one state to another. It’s about diving into a dumpster and coming up with a still-warm burger and three packets of mustard. It’s about detonating landmines with old truck tires and building bookshelves out of milk crates. It’s about barges. It’s about battery acid. It’s about paying sixty bucks for a change purse made of soda can tabs because the label says a women’s group in Latin America glued them together. It’s about sorting plastics. It’s about beaches built on landfills and landfills built on beaches. It’s about the “away” in throw away and the “out” in toss out and the “rid” in get rid of it. This is a blog about the art, money, power, politics, people and literature of garbage. It’s a subject that shocks and amuses me nearly every day, which is about how often I imagine I’ll be posting. I hope you’ll share in the fascination.