Creating Human Garbage

Robert Koehler

(10/31) "I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico."

This racist pseudo-joke, uttered by Tony Hinchecliffe at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, has been virally shamed. It’s even been denounced by Team Trump itself. But I bring it back into the limelight for a moment for several eerily linked reasons.

In two dozen words, followed by a snort of guilty laughter, this "joke" describes, indeed, encompasses, a serious slice of how humanity is destroying Planet Earth. To begin with, Hinchecliffe is right about the "floating Island of garbage." There is such a phenomenon, the presence of which no doubt deserves far more concern and attention than it gets.

It's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it’s far more than a single cluster of human waste. There are multiple such "islands" in the planet’s waters — not just in the oceans but in our lakes, including the Great Lakes, including rivers. Much of human debris — in particular, plastic, which does not biodegrade — is simply discarded: dumped wherever, much of it winding up in the water, where it floats downstream and eventually gets caught in a vortex of swirling currents and forms into clusters of floating . . . poison.

Much of this poison is composed of microplastics, which never go away. About eight million metric tons of plastic now enter the ocean every year, according to the website Treehugger, which notes that "a stunning 90 percent of all plastic items are used once and discarded. Only 9 percent of all plastic by mass gets recycled."

And fish consume this plastic, especially the microplastic, also known as nurdles. As Treehugger points out:

"Plastic pollution contaminates every ocean from surface to seafloor and from tropical waters to Arctic ice. It suffocates sea creatures large and small and enters all marine ecosystems and food webs, including the seafood that humans consume. If you are what you eat, then you are also what you throw away."

And as I noted in a column several years ago:

"We’re spreading toxicity around the planet and into the atmosphere not simply by overconsumption, greed and carelessness but also by a fundamental failure to value all of life. Only humans create garbage. This is because only humans divide the world into value and waste, fragmenting the global whole and turning it against itself. We, or at least some of us, not only turn a portion of our natural resources into garbage but consign part of the human race to the same category. And we’re always at war."

And this brings me back to the Trump rally "joke," which, yes, was too much even for Team Trump, which distanced itself from Hinchcliffe as soon as the outrage started pouring in. Unfortunately, the joke played on a trope all-too-common in Trump World and very much part of the message Trump feeds to his base. You know: us vs. them. There are bad, bad people out there — people who don’t look like us or believe in our god — and we have to work ever harder to keep them out of our country. God bless America only!

That is to say, not only are humans creating, and ignoring, the literal garbage that is ravaging our ecosystem and playing a serious role in the ever-expanding climate crisis, humans are also dehumanizing one another: turning other human beings into garbage as well.

Granted, doing so is a little bit more complex than it used to be. Political correctness sometimes intervenes, strictly censuring, for instance, certain racist terminology from the good old ("make America great again") days. Apparently linking Puerto Rico to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is also politically incorrect (Puerto Ricans being American citizens, after all). But dehumanizing the correct groups of people — emigrants, for instance — is perfectly legitimate. Us-vs.-them dehumanization apparently remains essential to many people’s identities and, of course, keeps the planet not only embroiled in wars everywhere but ever on the brink of nuclear war. Just what we need!

So later in the rally, Tucker Carlson seemed to dance around the racism and political correctness as he tried to plunk Kamala Harris into Not-One-Of-Us Land. If she wins, he said, she’d be "the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president."

And Trump himself said (falsely, of course) that Harris "has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo." He also promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (last used during World War II to toss people into internment camps) as part of his administration’s deportation process.

And recently, at a rally in Austin, Texas, Trump lamented: "We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want."

Human garbage: the metaphor lives! And at the same time that we are dehumanizing a portion of humanity, imprisoning them in this metaphor (and killing them if and when necessary), we are ignoring — shrugging our shoulders at — our endless creation of literal garbage, especially plastic, and dumping it into the planetary ecosystem, where it will stay forever.

No one makes the situation clearer than Trump. The time for change — the time for profound awareness — is now.

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