The Dreamer and His Garbage Container: A Paradoxical Tale of Poverty and Persistence

Who said great dreams don’t come true? The skeptics were referred to a simple Jordanian citizen who lives in a town in the south. The south has always been associated with poverty in the global economic division. In modern poetry, the south is associated with goodness and purity, or as the Lebanese poet Shawqi Bazie called it, the “reservoir of tenderness,” as a southern poet who experienced the mixture of poverty, generosity, and resistance in one human beaker.
This southern citizen had a great dream that he did not give up for years. It consisted of obtaining a garbage container for his neighborhood, which suffered from marginalization, like most towns in the south. However, he did not despair or lose hope. Rather, he kept going to the municipality, insisting on his request, until the “dream” was finally realized. To wake up one morning to the “bride” crouching in front of his house, he could not control himself from glee, and quickly wrote on the container with red paint the phrase: “My warm light”, and took a videotape of her that he showed on social media, so that the tape occupied the forefront of the most viewed and commented topics in Jordan For many days, it became a funny news in the local media.
Here, the news ends and the page of the container is folded, after some of them laughed at such an unprecedented paradox in the world of popular comedy, given that the poor have their small victories in the daily struggles of survival, in exchange for their great losses with the ghoul himself, but the news itself has other repercussions that he does not know. Except for the poor, alone, far from those who have overcome the “thinking inside the container” complex, and dealt with the existential struggle for survival, which has prolonged into a struggle over ranks and positions.
The news did not say, for example, that the citizen, after achieving his “small” victory, and the hustle and bustle of the celebration subsided, stood in front of the empty container, wondering what to fill it with? Is there waste coming out of the homes of the poor in the first place? If that were the case, the neighborhood cats would not have migrated long ago, so was his dream merely a claim for equality with neighborhoods full of overstuffed containers? Here, those responsible for the containers will find an excuse to delay in fulfilling this citizen’s request. The first question, upon receiving his petition, will be: What does this citizen need for the container, originally? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to distribute it to those who suffer from a huge surplus of food, drink and waste? Also, why did the citizen not start his demands from the top of rights, such as the right to a fair distribution of national wealth, or did he want to start in reverse from the lowest right to the highest? In this point of view, it may be correct, as we may see the dream elongate after years to demand that the same citizen illuminate the streets of the neighborhood at night, or to establish a station for the express bus, similar to what the capital recently enjoyed, despite the slow pace that successive governments are famous for, especially in Achievement of freedoms, in exchange for the speedy abandonment of them under false pretexts.
The news did not say, either, that the citizen’s insistence on the container was only in line with the emptiness experienced by the majority of citizens who face the requirements of living with empty pockets and empty balances, far beyond their age. Was this citizen looking for a kind of symmetry between the life of the inside and outside, for the house is empty, the pocket is empty, the balance is empty, and the future is more empty… So, he must see the container that his eyes will fall on when he leaves his house is also empty; To achieve psychological balance in his struggle with survival.
In general, what the news did not say is that those who think most outside the containers are the poor, and not the officials who are terrified of the containers, since they saw a European official being thrown into the garbage container at the hands of some demonstrators who saw him as redundant, or a politician whose validity period had expired and he is still insisting on clinging to his position.
On the sidelines of the news, there is a small phrase written in red paint on the container that no one has read: Containers are not just for rubbish.