Trump Recycling Speech Exposes Progressive Hypocrisy
By Joseph B Dychala
One of the most seemingly mundane, yet simultaneously fascinating experiences of my academic career involved recycling aluminum cans in a General Chemistry class I took at Delaware County Community College. My family has always been “green”, even before it was fashionable. Turn off the spigot while brushing your teeth, compost table scraps, grow backyard vegetables, use only what you need, waste not want not – all valuable lessons taught to me by my parents and their siblings, the Greatest Generation. Perhaps this stems from their strong Faith as we are all us called to be good stewards of our resources, quite possibly because they lived through the Depression and truly knew what it was to want.
This week Donald Trump gave a speech at a recycling plant in Pennsylvania and that region of the Internet known as Twitter couldn’t contain itself. Garbage speech in front of garbage pile stated one user, countless Oscar the Grouch references, cheap shots at the folks running the campaign, at Trump himself, the list goes on.
Those bales of crushed cans represented many things to me: jobs at factories producing the nations beverages; the countless hours of enjoyment at picnics, parties, gatherings at pubs and Legion halls, quick refreshment on street corners and in office building alike and of course the refuse collectors who gather this material from our curbs and the men and women who work in these recycling plants to make the most of our natural resources. Those cans also represented human ingenuity, the will to produce something convenient and affordable, something many of us take for granted today yet didn’t exist at the country’s founding.
To read the negative comments from Twitter users was bothersome. I have to wonder how many of these people are the ones that don’t want the jobs supposedly Americans don’t want to do, to justify unfettered immigration and open borders. Are these the hypocrites that drone on and on about saving the planet yet don’t bother to throw their own trash in a receptacle let alone separate material for recycling while demanding more intrusive regulations from the EPA. Are we as a people so out of touch that we forget convenience comes with a price.
To read these comments stating this material was “garbage” and not useful material destined for re-purposing reinforces the sad notion we live in a throwaway society. Here were images of an business, providing a service not only for consumers but quite possibly to the health of the planet and a sizable number of comments were so crass the only garbage I witnessed were the comments of a spoiled bunch of elitist brats from their safe spaces.
The phrase one man’s trash is another man’s treasure comes to mind…
What a thoughtful and marvelous post!
let us all try to raise and inspire our kids the same way that Joseph B Dychala’s parents did!