No one is concerned about the poops!
8 of swords, reversed.
I am launching a new initiative. It’s called, “I am concerned about the poops!”
Before I moved back to my mother’s broken home in an upscale South Delhi neighbourhood I lived in a downscale South Delhi neighbourhood, and one of the most memorable events through my life there was a long-winded, blustery, very, very angry Whatsapp chat among residents protesting the feeding (which is also - as no one in such chats seems to remember - the vaccination, sterilization, and general pacification) of stray dogs: someone posted, in the middle of a diatribe against persons who do kind things for animals, but, no one is concerned about the poops!
My friend who is as compulsively kind to animals as she is generous with human beings (and, truth be told, whose behaviour I’d been aping as I got into the gig - I’d been terrified of dogs till she showed me - walk like you’re an elephant - remember you’re three times their size - they’re so much more frightened of you than you are of them - companion animals, co-evolved with us - every one of them was born looking for a human being to love them) - she and I got on our laptops and alternated between rolling on the floor laughing and rolling our eyes at each other exaggeratedly in response - must’ve been Covid-times, since we hadn’t met up to do it…
In any case, unbeknownst to me, the comment sank deep roots into my soul - to this day, six years later, I inevitably evoke it whenever I need a laugh or a pick-me-up; the picking-me-up happens because, man, was I concerned about the poops, and man, did I do something about it.
It’s the one thing that makes me love myself. I cannot stand, I cannot stand the way human beings treat animals. Including human animals - ie. the people they decide are animals - which is by my calculation pretty much everyone they decide is wrong, weird, dangerous, deformed, unimportant, irrelevant - what Judith Butler called “ungrievable”. It’s not always bigotry either - we also decide lives are ungrievable that we decide we can’t, or can’t afford to, grieve. Rats, for example. Can’t go around mourning the death of rats or, we believe, we’ll be overrun, we’ll get sick, we won’t be able to get anything done for which we need a space free of rat poop, or wires that haven’t been gnawed, or food that hasn’t been tainted with rat saliva, or the comfortable (though illusory) certainty that all around us is a leptospira-free bubble.
None of the above is actually true, of course. It just takes a lot of time to clean and clean and clean, dispose of organic matter through effective composting, consistently keep discouraging rats from entering via this hole or that route - long drawn-out, exhausting and Sisyphean processes all. Who has the time and the energy to do it, when rat poison, glue traps, and a host of other demonic alternatives are getting sold to us as efficient, common, normative, and cheap? What would the estimation even be, and how estimated, by which a life legally defined as that of a “pest” and linguistically encoded as that of “vermin” might be valued?
I also don’t like stepping in dog-poop, find the barking of dogs distressing, start sobbing uncontrollably when animals get accidentally mangled amidst human life, and feel sickened by the prevalence of starvation and the perpetuation of preventable or curable illness (human or nonhuman). So I adopted every stray dog I found who wasn’t getting on well in her or his environment till I ran out of physical strength, money, and emotional energy. I think that was awesome. I did good! I don’t do good often - am neither a very good person, nor terribly intelligent, nor skilled or capable, nor responsible, disciplined or truly kind - but in this one thing, I did alright!
Much is wrong all around me, I am embroiled in much conflict, feel much misery at much in the world, experience much pain, am seized of much anger, much of the time. I am very tired, very deeply unhappy, struggle with feelings of resentment, envy, and a bone-deep sense of being fundamentally flawed, fundamentally unfulfilled. As far as I can see, so do we all. I think this template of human experience is actively fostered by a system that’s designed to keep us paralysed so we don’t notice we’re trading time, energy, space, life, for simulations of pleasure. On all our many, many platforms, the perpetual refrain is, XYZ person, peoples, or construct of said person or peoples, are creating ABC problem, they need to be stopped. (Big powers and big leaders step into this and invariably claim that they shall be the one to stop them, they have a plan, they have the means, and let no one question the method for there is none better possible, feasible, on hand, manifest, imaginable.) In the mean time, we’re sad, outraged, nauseated, and more and more dead inside.
I had an other idea today. Because I suddenly remembered in the midst of a pain-wracked hate-hazy self-defeating harangue of my incapacitated self, that I, I, I am concerned about the poops! My dogs poop in my yard, and I compost it! They eat well, get groomed and treated for any ailments or injuries, get loved and feel like they belong, do not bite anyone, and only get noisy when left behind as I walk the rest!
How wonderful it would be if everyone said, not that they alone were concerned about the infinitely proliferating and infinitely piled up poops but that, omilord it looks like the park behind our homes is collecting poops and I got so sick of it this morning I actually got a bag of cocopeat (or collected a load of leaf mulch) and covered up a good chunk of it! What’s going on with you?
This is my initiative in a nutshell! How about we change the terms of prescribed conversation? Every single one of us saw a problem and did something right to fix it today. Every single one. Varying degrees of success and effectiveness but who cares? There’s no do or do not in anyone’s life but Yoda’s, there is only try. So why don’t I tell you mine and you tell me yours? We’ll both feel good about it, get ourselves some sympathy as well as a laugh, and who knows, we might even learn something! At the very least we’ll learn we’re not each other’s enemy - we’re alright really.
So.
My baby was hungry and I’m so hungry my breasts aren’t producing milk. So I went to the red light and banged on people’s car windows till folks gave me enough cash to buy food. I’m really worried about air pollution. So I’ve decided I’ll stop taking my car out for anything other than hauling goods - I’ll take the metro for everything else this day on. My boss keeps making misogynistic remarks - it’s driving everyone wild. So I put up a poster of Rosie the riveter on the notice board.
Your turn. Tell!