Bankrupt

Trash city is bankrupt.
No - there's plenty of cash floating round - despite the appearance of poverty. That's the secret to this place - it's *trashy*, not poor.

I mean that it is ethically and intellectually (and therefore artistically and aesthetically) bankrupt. To look around and see people living in squalor, in filthy clothes with their skin nearly peeling off their necks and arms from malnutrition and grime, loading bulging trollies of plastic food in shiny foil packages into the boots of their giant new sedans with the optional metallic paint and spoilers is to see the human condition in a cold light.

This city is a place where every discount store chain (and many independent ones) has a shop - a large one. You know the ones I mean - "Everything $2!" - container loads of crap from China: plastic ponchos, toiletry sets in presentation bags, tourist shirts, tat, tat, and more tat. It's all here, and it's doing a roaring trade. These stores make up the majority of shopping in Trash City. Apart from what passes as *food* here of course. This is heartbreaking. There is a huge amount of wealth here. Natural resources (mining!), clean air and space, industry (jobs), military bases (more jobs), a river, fertile soils ... and yet these people choose to make themselves into trash. Seemingly all for the want of the idea that it could be any other way.

I remember one day standing on a worn carpet on a hand-made balcony looking down and out over a vista of stinking pits. I had never seen anything like it in my life and it shocked me at every level. These pits were utterly gorgeous to look at, and in pictures they're very pretty. But each adobe pit was filled with stinking, sulpherous chemicals made from dung and urine, and in every single pit, was a child. Those children were doing the legwork (literally) of the famous leather of Fez which is all hand-cured, hand dyed and hand sewn, or was. Now they have a lot of sewing machines (so they can whip you up a knock-off Prada bag by lunch). So this was *obviously* a hard life.
In Morocco for example, nothing would go unsalvaged. Everything would be put to use - over and over again until it decomposed in service. Even a scrap of paper, that one might wrap a sandwich in, was a resource with other uses to be fufilled. Yet, this place felt rich. Rich in culture, rich in care, rich in purpose. On that trip I saw a lot of poverty, and I felt like an ignorant and foolish person, becuase at nearly every interaction I was at a loss to match the dignity and self-possession of the people I met.
To see the denizens of Trash City deliberately squandering themselves and their wealth to create a plastic bubble of failure and miserable consumption denigrates the honour of all those people in the world, and in our history who truely do suffer and strive to live and to thrive. My pain at seeing it must be as a mere droplet in the greater spirit's pain of this travesty.

This is what lies behind so much of my anger at this place - is the pain of the waste and the ignorance that if remedied could so easily form these exact same people and resources into a vibrant, soulful, healthy place.
Instead, I see their own leaders gull them at every turn and bank upon their ignorance and plight. I am disgusted to my core and sick with the stench of failure.
I have been unable to wake even my closest co- workers up - to even the suggestion of change. I've always belived that the personal *is* political, that living one's beliefs is the first, best
contribution to make. In this place, all of my beliefs are under siege.
Do I have the strength to stay on, or do I beat a strategic retreat?