Good Ideas can be Evil
Two Laws, The Most Vulnerable, and a Struggling City
This year has been full of crazy in my city. Not too long ago, the government decided that they were going to enforce two laws that would affect the majority of Guatemalans. The first one was around waste management. All homes and businesses were supposed to start separating their waste. In some municipalities, the separation was between organic and inorganic waste. In others, it was more sophisticated: organic, recyclables, and general waste.
The second law wasn’t new. It was the enforcement of a previously approved transit law that requires all vehicle owners to have liability insurance. Recycling and car insurance may seem to you like a common practice in the US and Europe, but in the Global South it is different. Sometimes, our cities lack the basic infrastructure to function well.
The ideas behind these laws are not bad per se. In the first one, waste management is something that we lack in our city. We do not have a landfill where waste is managed appropriately based on a classification system. We have a dump. And the dump sustains the lives of approximately thirteen thousand people. People work under the scorching sun from dusk until dawn. They manually classify the city’s waste to make a few bucks a day. There is a whole system of abuse and oppression that benefits the powers that be through the dump’s recycling system. If the law was implemented, 13,000 people would lose their livelihood overnight.
The law of liability insurance for all motor vehicles is not bad in and of itself either. There are tons of accidents daily. People die. And, the majority of those who survive have to access a precarious public healthcare system that may or may not help them to fully recover from their injuries. So, in theory, liability insurance would help our city to provide better coverage and financial aid for those who find themselves in a traffic accident.
However, these laws showed us how fragile and fractured our government infrastructure is. Even more so, they revealed what happens when institutions have been intentionally designed to take advantage of the most vulnerable.
In both cases, the most vulnerable and impoverished came together to protest these apparently good ideas. in the case of the waste management law, the families affected by it, the poorest of the poor, came together and paralyzed the garbage collection system of the city for three full days. As a result, the garbage piled up really quickly, and the protesters were able to open a conversation channel between the garbage collectors and the municipal government.
The liability insurance enforcement ended up bringing the whole city to halt for two days. Every day people came out to block the main arteries of our city to show their discontent. We live in a city where people are forced to own a vehicle due to the lack of proper public transit. Those who are able to afford a small motor bike or scooter do it through a huge financial sacrifice. Those who can’t afford it spend an average of three to five hours in traffic every day using whatever public transit is available. If the law was enforced, already financially strained households would have an extra expense on salaries that can barely afford them food security.
It has been very interesting to hear people talk about these laws and the people demonstrating against them. Social media and personal conversations reflect a lack of empathy from a lot of people. If you were to engage in conversation with people who come from better financial means, you would hear a narrative of inconvenience. I heard and read comments that said: “These people (referring to garbage collectors) should just do their jobs.” Or, “the blockades are such an inconvenience, if people can afford a vehicle they should be required to afford insurance.” On the other side, if you were to talk to people who would be negatively affected, you could hear them say: “Sorting through recyclables is the only thing I know. I just want to do it safely.” Or, “I cannot afford another monthly payment of any kind.” As simple as these statements can be, they carry the weight of uncertainty, anxiety, and the difficulty to survive in a society that sees the most vulnerable and impoverished as expendable, and as a group to profit from.
The first type of comments happen when we want to control people’s responses to their pain and anxiety. If somebody else’s pain becomes an inconvenience, why should others care?
The current systems tend to put the weight and responsibility of our actions on the most vulnerable. When the most vulnerable don’t want to carry our load, we feel inconvenienced. That is why people react without empathy. Jesus, however, shows us a different way. He has compassion for the most vulnerable. He fed them, healed them, and set them free. Yet we want to keep the most vulnerable at our service—cleaning our houses, picking the fields, and serving us, not in the streets protesting for their right to a better life. We are no better nor different than the Romans, the Pharisees, and other teachers of the law and politicians in Jesus’s time.
The system wants the most vulnerable srving the centers of power for its own benefit. Our task, however, is to reimagine our humanity with the most vulnerable as we resist the systems that dehumanize us all.
A couple reflection questions:
Who are the most vulnerable in your context at this time?
What is happening to them?
Keep talking that talk!!! Also, been reading Sobrino. Came across this yesterday:
The Church of the poor is not automatically the agent of truth and grace because the poor are in it; rather the poor in the Church are the structural source that assures the Church of being really the agent of truth and justice. In the final analysis, I am speaking of what Jesus refers to in Matthew 25 as the place where the Lord is to be found.
This was such a good read!!