You Are A Man!
or
The Recycling Farce in Berkeley
6 September 1997
Dear Friends and Allies:
Please ask me why Wednesday mornings are so irritating in Berkeley.
Thank you. The reasons why Wednesday mornings are so irritating here in Berkeley are the sounds of the Recycling Poachers at work. Crashing and breaking glass, the dull clatter of aluminum and tin being thrown into shopping carts--these are the dominant sound events on the morning the big recycling truck is supposed to come around to pick up the recycling. You can hear the crashing perhaps two blocks away as the Poachers come nearer and nearer, and then you can hear the crashing recede into the distance.
Some environmentalist or city official had the bright idea that people should put out their recyclables in the City of Berkeley supplied blue molded plastic containers on the same day the garbage gets picked up. So far, so good. A firm that has the contract to do the recycling is supposed to gather the cash value materials such as aluminum and glass, and the profits from those materials are supposed to cover the cost of picking up the tons of newspaper and cardboard and mixed paper that the resale market is glutted with.
Back to the Poachers. It must have been about a week after the start of the curbside recycling program that the Poachers got the schedule of what streets would have pickups on what days. The Poachers began to cruise the neighborhood wheeling a flotilla of stolen shopping carts with huge garbage bags hanging off of the sides of the carts.
The broken twigs and torn petals of bushes or flowering plants near the sidewalk marked the arrival of the Poachers. The territories had been discovered. The battles began.
I am a conservationist. I maintain a lovely compost bin. I wash out bottles and cans. I heft the bottles down two flights of stairs to the street. I believe in the conservation of resources. I hate waste. I especially hate to see self-funded programs turn into yet another infernal drain of money from the taxpayers. We pay deposits on our bottles. We contribute the bottles and the returned deposits are meant to fund recycling. Instead, the Poachers avoid paying taxes, and collect the deposit money while making taxpayers pay yet again for recycling programs.
So I did battle with the Poachers. I refused to let them subvert the program without a fight. For the first few years, I would run down the stairs and out to the street when I heard the early morning telltale sounds of glass and metal being thrown into a cart. I had some victories. Some Poachers were distressed by my vigilance. Swear words were exchanged. And I followed procedures. As per recycling program policy, I telephoned the police to report when the Poachers had won and gotten away with my contribution to a sensible social program. The police were supposed to be on the lookout for the Poachers. I have a feeling it was more of a look away from the Poachers, but I do not fault the police for wanting to avoid low priority prickly situations in a densely populated urban area.
The Poachers began coming earlier and earlier in the morning. The Poachers with trucks would start before dawn. One morning I ran out to be confronted by 3 black men emerging from a truck. I held my ground despite the feeling that I didn't want to be injured in a fight over bottles and cans. I started carrying pepper spray on my run out to the sidewalk.
There is a racial component to the Poacher activity. The Poachers are predominantly black men. My neighborhood used to be predominantly white. Even as my neighborhood turns Asian-Mexican-Black, the Poachers are predominantly black men.
The race card gets played. My last furious confrontation over the bins of bottles and cans included me trying to be logical with the Black Poacher.
Me: "If you steal all the valuable recycling, how will the recycling program be paid for?
Him: "I don't care."
Me: "If you people take everything.."
Him: "Whaddya mean, you people? YOU'RE SAYING THIS BECAUSE I'M BLACK."
Me: "YOU CAN'T RACE-BAIT ME!"
That was the first time those specific words ever left my mouth, and it was quite a feeling. I'm not even sure if I used the term correctly. There was a look of astonishment on the face of the Poacher. Score one small one for Elena.
But in the aggregate, after years of trying to foil the Poachers, the battles have taken their toll on me. I am so tired of doing battle or ignoring the outrageous that I don't even want to put out the recycling any more. The task gets put off until it must be done. I've even started throwing some recyclable paper into the garbage. My multikulti neighbors generally don't recycle. Sometimes it seems absurd to worry about the few cubic feet of my recycled garbage when so many others around me can't be bothered with the most elementary conservation of resources.
Let us segue.
Please come with me now on a recent trip made to the big office supplies warehouse store. Buying office supplies is always a toss up between the closer small store that charges more money, is run by Asians and requires a walk through the streets of Third World Berkeley OR a drive to the warehouse type store where the prices are better but the employees are slow and the goods are generally made in China. As I drove the streets to the store, I did my usual personal census of occupants in oncoming cars:
"Asian, Asian, Asian, Mexican, Black...White, wow! Another White!...Asian, Black, Asian, Mexican, Asian..."
and so on until I could no longer manage even a grim laugh at the disastrous invasion of California.
At the office supplies warehouse store, I was one of the 5 White customers with scores of Asian and Mexican immigrants and their anchor baby kids surrounding us. There were no shopping carts easily available. In a city where shopping carts are the preferred vehicle for Poachers, that's not surprising. I did my usual search for goods made in the U.S.A. It was a small victory when I saw that what I needed was Made In The U.S.A. Then I had to hurry back to work to finish a mailing and get it to the Post Office before 5 p.m.
So off I went with my ream of paper and box of manila envelopes. In the parking lot, the usual multikulti group--this time, Asian immigrants--were standing around talking. As I put my purchases in the car, I noticed a tall black man looking around to see who was watching him. He scanned the lot, then grabbed the handles of two brand-new-clean-heavy-duty empty shopping carts and wheeled them away from the store in the direction of the recycling buyback center 6 blocks down the road. He was off with sturdy new vehicles for the Poachers. There was no reaction from anyone in the parking lot. No see, no hear, no care.
The motto of Berkeley:
"If it's not P.C. Anti-White: No see, no hear, no care".
As I watched the thief depart with the carts, I realized I would probably see the carts &/or him on the sidewalk where I live. I was witnessing the reproduction and perpetuation cycle of the Poachers. The thief was also raising the operating costs of the store that owned the carts. The excuse I had heard from a manager of the store for not buying U.S.A. made goods was that increased operating and labor costs meant that they had to buy cheap goods from China in order to stay in business. The cumulative impacts of the theft of the shopping carts were more than I could endure. I jumped into my old stationwagon and stepped on the accelerator to cut the thief off at the pass. With a radical right turn, I pulled in front of him and his wheelaway loot, jumped out of the car, and started yelling at him:
"DO YOUR DUTY AS A MAN! You are supposed to protect women and children, not steal! You are a Man! You are a Man! You are a MAN!"
Even though he was significantly taller than me, the thief looked at me as though I were a clone of Godzilla that had risen from the sea and had learned to speak in a wild but comprehensible language.
 |
"The Thief's Point of View" |
As I yelled, for one moment, I saw thirty years of Civil Rights movement lies and crud and calls for "Get Over on Whitey!" fall away. I saw in his eyes that he knew what I was yelling about even though my words were somewhat amiss. For just one moment I saw in his eyes the recognition that he had abandoned responsibility to himself and those who would be dear to him by listening to the lies of the agitators and self-proclaimed experts on the supposed oppression of The Man. He was a big, strong man and he was living like a bum in filthy clothes, creating a sad life as a shopping cart thief.
I believe it was the Anti-Whites who persuaded him this broken life was permissible and excusable and inevitable. And of course, the Anti-Whites have made lots of money accusing Whites of the "sins" of self-interest and wanting to live in a homogeneous civilized nation where doors can be left unlocked. The Anti-Whites don't care if their propaganda causes disaster for the individual or the nation. The Anti-Whites have made enough money to escape into gated communities while the would-be middle class struggles with the results of legislated institutionalized insanity.
Meanwhile, the thief and I were postured as pawns in a struggle begun perhaps a century ago.There was a short silence--one of those micromoments of rushing blood and eye-of-the-hurricane calm.
"Okay, okay, okay!" he said. "Just stop screaming at me."
The thief walked away from the carts. I turned to get back in my car and noticed two White men who had apparently seen the exchange. One man had the grace to look confused, as though he had seen a very strange manifestation and wasn't sure if he should do something. The other man looked so typical of men around here, with his thin ponytail out the back of an upscale designer's baseball cap. "Ponytail" had a sneer on his face that was apparently meant for me. His look of contempt seemed to be a dismissal of me as a woman who had the gall to stop the soul brother from stealing whatever he wanted--something "Ponytail" would never dream of doing.
I looked back at "Ponytail" and saw a zombie not worth waking. It was time to leave and let the zombie sneer.
Sincerely,
Elena Haskins
Friends and Allies Only Email to: NotAZombie@aol.com
Copyright © 1997 Elena Haskins.
Reproduction strictly prohibited without advance written permission.
All Rights Reserved.
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don't shake my tree.