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Compost heap now embodies the American Dream
By Mary Ann Cook
You know how everybody all the time talks about the American Dream? Well, I think it's garbage. And I mean that literally, not figuratively. Allow me to explain.
Along with the high-tech life that most of us live these days is a backlash that trails faithfully along beside us, whining and nagging every step of the way. It's a mantra that repeats and repeats in one's ear, "I've gotta get closer to nature."
We decry the fact that our lives are so hard and software-driven, that we're losing touch with Mother Earth. And so we jog, power walk, join the Sierra Club, embrace alternative medicine and shop exclusively at health food stores.
Many who toil over a warm and humming computer for their livelihood have the mistaken idea that they need to get back to the soil. They carry this so far as to yearn to be farmers, even though they'd probably be miserable if they actually dumped their present-day pursuits to root about in the dirt.
There's something so balanced, so predictable--so spiritual, even--about the seasons, about getting your hands dirty with loam and fertilizer, about planting and nurturing, about the miracle of getting plants to grow, goes the reasoning.
But though most of these people never become full fledged farmers, they do have a quicker, less encompassing, less exhausting fallback position they can assume. They can start a compost heap. That's right, they can spend many a maggot-laden minute glorifying garbage.
But these people are a menace to the rest of us. There's no one quite so smug or so self righteous as those who maintain their own compost heaps. Have you ever encountered one of these zealots who kept their garbage where it should be kept--to themselves?
No, certainly not. The thrill of ownership is loudly and proudly proclaimed, pointed out, even. People who have the compost heap mentality think they are such good citizens, such pure environmentalists that they are infuriatingly condescending to those of us who may be lacking in the telltale sights and smells of organic deterioration.
Have these trash traders, these refuse stockpilers, forgotten that man has spent eons trying to figure out how to get rid of the stuff, not nurture and accumulate more of it? In olden days, in B.C. days (Before Computers), whole villages moved on when the trash level got too high to handle.
Today we don't have that luxury. Today town and village officials quake when asked about their future garbage prospects, their landfill levels. Garbage disposal is a worldwide problem and these compost heap progenitors are glorying in adding to the level, not taking it away.
Yes, yes, I know they'll turn it into the earth around their plants so that more healthful nutrients will be added to their growing matter. Still and all, it's a dump, no matter what it's named. A dump in every yard is what the compost crowd seeks, crows for.
So has the American Dream for this generation now in their 30s and 40s metamorphosed into the maintainance of a well-balanced compost heap? I think that indeed is the real answer to what the American Dream of today is.
Because these wage-earners/homeowners have accumulated everything material the marketplace has to offer, the only thing left for them to strive for is a reversal of the process. The only place to turn, the only goal to seek after acquiring all that composition is decomposition.
The idea is environmentally sound. It's the American way. It's rotting, it's rotten, but it's the American Dream.
Mary Ann Cook is a freelance writer.
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Campbell, California
