Dirty Life!

Walking around the Rodgers Center, or basically any rural dairy country in Upstate NY you can’t help but notice the smell of silage, the mud and manure, the rundown barns and old and decrepit farm homes. Good ol dairy country can be pungent depending on the time of year.

With work, I’ve also had the opportunity to travel to New York City and Coney Island and canvassed public housing buildings in the city. They’re often quite diapilated and in rough shape, dirty grimy buildings with enormous piles of garbage.

Suburbia likes to hide the mud and manure that makes the world go round. It’s a plastic world, the suburbs buy food wrapped in plastic far away from the smells of the farm and buried in a distant garbage dump. Let the working folk deal with the smells and dirt of the real world. But denialism doesn’t make it disappear.

Poverty and the debris that makes up our world is often seen as something to look down at, almost sub human. Those dirty tenements and farms. But it’s a lot closer to reality than the suburbanite would want to admit. Cows and diesel tractors, are real life. As the piles of garbage that sit outside of the blighted buildings in the city. We all consume natural resources and we all generate waste – it’s all part of who we are as a species. Even though the suburbanite is in denial.