In the dumps--literally!

Have you thought that when things get really bad, you might need to become a dumpster diver and gather cans and paper to sell at the recycling center just to keep body and soul together? Well, you'd better have a Plan B handy because the recycling industry is now on the cutting edge of depression. The bottom has dropped out in the recycled materials market. Fewer firms are buying the paper and the bottles and the cans; those that are still buying are doing so at greatly reduced prices. Which, of course, means that the incomes of sellers are dropping precipitously. Which, of course, means hunger and homelessness for many. Only a year ago, how many would have thought that, of all things, earning income by ad hoc garbage collecting (what the euphemistically named "recycling" in truth is) would be in jeopardy in the allegedly richest country on earth?

I've thought for many years that the appearance of prosperity in America was pure vapor, pure facade. In my gut I knew differently. I used to shudder whenever I saw somebody rummaging through a dumpster because I knew that with just a short run of bad luck I could be there too. Today, that vapor is dissipating so fast that even earning a meagre income is a crap shoot. What happens now to the people who have depended on recycling to earn money for their families? What happens to the millions of American families who soon will have no income and no way to get any? What happens if the abyss we have fallen into has no bottom? What if the economic wreckage piling up around us is the new permanent way of life in this country? What if all the talk of recovery we are hearing from our leaders-to-be is just as much vapor as all that talk of prosperity we heard from our leaders-of-the-past? How will we keep body and soul together next year, and the year after, and the year after that? Why are we letting this catastrophe happen?

Read about it here